Artist
Luna Mahoux
I currently live in Paris, and I'm finishing my last year of a double master's degree at La Cambre Bruxelles and Ecole d'art de Cergy. It was music and black life that brought me to different environments and countries in 2021, like Chicago, where I worked with local communities for four months. There have been several venues where I have presented my work, including Treize in 2021 and Cherish in 2022. Earlier this year, I self-published a book of photos and texts, "2 strong for 2 long".
Never broken again
Her gaze diving into the blue light of her screen, Luna Mahoux has scoured the internet and social networks since her teenage years in search of genealogical ties to the Black diaspora. From windows to tabs, the artist curates Black visual content, which she integrates into her ever-expanding collection of moving images.
In this extensive archive of live performance images, interviews with celebrities, random moments and scenes in the lives of strangers, Luna Mahoux cuts, separates, recontextualises and superimposes image, music and sound. From logobi and images of running athletes to wedding footage, Luna Mahoux produces a sensitive – and sometimes critical – discourse on popular culture from the 2000s onwards, revisiting the idea of kinship and addressing the issue of police violence. She sets out a series of actions that (re-)assemble, that repair the rips and tears. She allows fragments to speak for themselves and fills the moments of silence with music, images or her own words. Cutting, separating, superimposing, recontextualising: all these practices mark the artist’s (de)construction of her Black identity and denote the emotional relationship that links her personal history to that of the diaspora. Through the artist’s lighted windows, we are seeing diasporic friction and abrasion re-enacted. Figures with dark eyes hold each other and brush against each other as they dance, mothers embrace each other in mourning, lovers hug impulsively, all to “make visible memories and create potential narratives”. By drawing on the everyday, the artist’s images—which record the “magical power” that social media images and Google Maps searches secrete—subtly add to the technological, (oceanic) blue and fluid Afro-diasporic imagination.
Text by Caroline Honorien
The format hasn’t changed since the magazine’s inception in 2012. However, the project's scope has expanded significantly – .tiff has evolved into a platform, offering a year-long trajectory of presentations, conversations with experts, and exhibitions. FOMU leverages its extensive network, expertise and resources to stimulate the artists' artistic practices and personal visions.
The selection process involves reaching out to professionals in the Belgian photography scene, as well as to previous participants. This results in a long-list encompassing a diverse range of backgrounds. For this edition, FOMU departed from its usual practice and solicited the expertise of 3 external jurors: Sorana Munsya, independent curator; Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo; and Max Pinckers, .tiff alumnus and artist. Together, we carefully curated a diverse group of artists, always mindful of whether the participants would benefit from our support at this particular juncture in their careers.
This 11th edition of .tiff marks a new beginning with a fresh design, while it also safeguards its strengths. Throughout the years, .tiff has fostered a thriving Belgian photography community that transcends language barriers, enabling rich exchanges of ideas between artists, curators and critics. The current selection exemplifies the continued growth of this community, and Belgian photography’s ability to reinvent itself year after year.