Into the Fading Lines (2026) is a series of reproductions of war photographs and architectural landscape photographs derived from archival research.
Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s practice, at the intersection of conceptual art and artistic research, interrogates geopolitical and historical memory through the lens of individual experience and how its traces reverberate across generations and continents. The newly commissioned series Into the Fading Lines (2026) is a moving example of how Kaabi-Linke’s long-standing practice of archival research revealed unknown aspects of her own ancestry. Born to a Ukrainian mother and Tunisian father and raised in Tunisia, Kaabi-Linke uncovered that there were no fewer than three Tunisian Tirailleurs in her own family lineage, who fought on behalf of France in the First and Second World Wars. The work departs from reproductions of archival photographs from a range of sources, including family collections and public archives in France and Tunisia. The images depict Tunisian Tirailleurs in battle, in transit, or in barracks, and perhaps, most revealingly, in moments of quotidian life. A UV-blocking filter was applied to selected photographs, which were then exposed to the Tunisian sun. The effect is deliberate and striking: all traces of the colonial apparatus— uniforms, flags, weapons, war infrastructure—are obscured. What is left are the images of the Tirailleurs themselves, brought back into visibility and captured as individuals. In the artist’s own words: ‘What remains are the burnouts—the emptied shells of power and the traces of resistance that grow with the light blinding the shadows.’ An additional new work in the exhibition transforms a French colonial propaganda film by bringing to the fore material signs of age and wear and tear in the original footage. By isolating these traces of damage and removing the visual content of the colonial narrative, the work performs a refusal to recirculate these ideological framings in the present.
– Jill Winder (HKW)
From Tirailleurs—Handbook. A publication of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), edited by Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Berlin, 2026, p. 157.
