10 
MuseoMag   N°III 2023 
Eight artists respond to this year’s prompt Rethinking Identity at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart. 
© 
éric 
chenal 
THE MANY FACES OF IDENTITY 
European Month of Photography 2023 
Photography was once seen as a way of objectively 
recording reality, the counterpart to the creative act 
of painting. The medium, however, has long since 
been unveiled as highly subjective, presenting 
complex interpretations of reality by way of the lens 
rather than paint. It is only fitting that photography 
is leveraged to express and complicate our 
understanding of who we are in the show Je est 
un autre, staged as part of the European Month 
of Photography (EMOP) at the Nationalmusée um 
Fëschmaart. 
Here, we see eight different artists navigate the 
murky waters of identity, the self and the other 
in response to this year’s prompt Rethinking 
Identity. Walking through the exhibition, we glimpse 
fragmented visions of the self – a reflected face 
here, a jumble of individual features there – that 
investigate the borders and edges of identity by 
photographic means. Whether they’re obscuring 
faces or distorting them, the artists deftly manipulate 
their visual material to make statements about the 
ways we see ourselves and each other. 
RACIAL AND GENDERED IDENTITIES 
A number of works on display consider identity 
through the prism of race and gender. Frida 
Orupabo’s striking collages, for instance, 
superimpose one face onto another, drawing on 
archival material to comment on colonial violence 
and gender stereotypes. In the work Turning (2021), a 
white woman is portrayed suggestively from behind, 
yet her face, which is turned at an impossible angle, 
is that of a person of colour staring impassively at 
the viewer. This exposes the voyeurism of the pose 
and makes the spectator complicit in the act of 
objectifying the female body. 
Another artist who makes use of collage in her work 
is Lunga Ntila, the self-taught South African artist 
who tragically passed away last year at the age of 
27. Using a distinctive cut-and-paste aesthetic, her 
compositions address the dual themes of identity 
and displacement. Her self-portrait Define Beauty III 
(2019) multiplies features and questions conventional 
beauty standards, drawing both on African culture 
and Cubist traditions. 
Zanele Muholi also turns the camera on themself 
in two gripping high contrast prints on display 
in the show, exaggerating the darkness of their 
skin tone as a way of reclaiming their blackness. 
Drawing on the power of the unexpected, they frame 
themself with unconventional objects, as in Labo I, 
Torino (Italy) (2019), where they sport a large folded 
blanket as a headdress. Known for documenting 
the queer experience in South Africa, the artist