Ariella Aïcha Azoulay is a political theorist who uses visual tools for an anticolonial study of the violence inherent in technologies and institutions such as museums, archives, and the nation-state. Her work La résistance des bijoux (2023) helps us to imagine once again the world that preceded colonial divisions imposed upon the centuries-old entanglement of African, Jewish, Arab, and Amazigh worlds–divisions that also separate people and their craftsmanship.

Tunisian artist Nidhal Chamekh is known for taking the medium of drawing and turning it from a simple line to become a tool for political and historical investigation through archives; used particularly in a critical endeavour or decolonisation of images and knowledge. For the series Nos visages, he found sources in French colonial propaganda (Le Miroir review, created in 1910), in which World War I Senegalese and Berber tirailleurs (African soldiers who fought for the French) were reduced to ethno-racial tropes. We are all too familiar with the photographic portrait or sketch of the colonised, the foreigner, and the slave in the colonial imagination. Rather than putting a name to the many faces he has redesigned (using an ink transfer technique on textile), the artist radicalises the erasure of their existence by superimposing two sides of faces that contradict each other. The concept transcends blurring identities to assume the risk of tearing through skin to get closer to the silent wounds of a history rendered by the ‘official’ victors. Faces that contributed to the liberation of France–but remain forever on the margins of its national narrative–and of a war that is defined as ‘global’, though it primarily involved European colonial empires. The proximity of this ghostly work to Louis John Endres's Orientalist drawing of African soldiers opens a breach in a system of representation that is outmoded, yet survives in remanence.