MuseoMag: MuseoMag 2023_03

MuseoMag 2023_03

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Title:: MuseoMag

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Title:: MuseoMag 2023_03

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Title:: The many faces of identity: European Month of Photography 2023

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

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