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

11 N°III 2023 MuseoMag EXHIBITION is both a photographer and a visual activist. Over in Luxembourg, Bruno Oliveira is also committed to shedding light on his home country’s growing queer community in his series In Ore Gloria (2021). Here, the artist investigates gendered identities and challenges heteronormative values in edgy colour prints that range from the lyrical to the theatrical, one of which is featured on the cover of the MuseoMag. In the exhibition, the fantastical soundscape A Trip to Neverland (2020) further heightens the sense of the surreal conveyed by Oliveira’s photographs. FACELESS SUBJECTS Other artists in the show obscure the faces of their subjects in different ways to comment on the multifaceted nature of identity. Katinka Goldberg, for example, makes use of an iterative process to examine the portrait genre, swapping features for flowers and plants in a series entitled The portraits of my grandmother Assne (2020). By replacing her grandmother’s face with a variety of different motifs, the artist creates distance between the viewer and the subject, emphasising the unbridgeable gap between two very different lived realities. Luxembourg-based artist Krystyna Dul may show her face in her series Mamas & Papas (2022), but it is digitally modified with features that are not her own, her eyes, nose and mouth varying from one image to the next. When does a self-portrait become a portrait of someone else, she asks here? The series’ title refers to the fact that Dul’s daughter recognises her mother in these pictures. Subverting the traditions of the portrait genre in a different way, Corina Gertz photographs her subjects from the back in her series Averted Portrait. Her works focus on clothing traditions and document diversity through forms of dress rather than facial features. Sharing Gertz’s interest in dress as a marker of identity, Lívia Melzi’s prints focus on a collection of cloaks belonging to the Tupinambá tribe which were used in anthropophagic rituals and were removed from Brazil during the first centuries of the country’s colonisation. Blending sociological and artistic research, Melzi studies the reception of these sacred garments in Europe and their presentation in Western museums. Indeed, the way these institutions choose to display the cloaks says as much about their own belief system as it does about the objects themselves. Melzi’s photographs show the disembodied garments on display in various settings, underlining the importance of context in the meaning-making process. When seen as a whole, the disparate and diverging perspectives of this year’s EMOP show demonstrate the fluid nature of identity, expand the notion of selfhood and challenge the genre of the (self-) portrait, opening up further avenues of investigation and study for years to come. Katja Taylor Je est un autre on view until the 22 October 2023 at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart

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