artist and vision

"Her photographic images are not there to read the world,

but to see a world in them." © Ruth Loos - 2017

With the words "Become who you are" by Simone De Beauvoir in mind, Faryda Moumouh has been working artistically as a visual artist for over 24 years, seeking her visual language in the photographic medium. Her prior training and studies in Art Secondary, Photography as Higher Art Education have liberated her thinking. A Masters in Audiovisual and Visual Arts, have given her a strength and autonomy to fully stand up for herself and follow her own unique path. Which was not obvious with her Moroccan background. As an atheist and teenager, she found much comfort and recognition, in the words and texts of the Existentialists. Which gave her the courage not to be an object but a subject. Her unique way of seeing, freed her from all kinds of societal expectations, clichés and stereotypical thoughts. Trying to transcend her ethnic identity to be herself above all, became her greatest strength as a human being and an artist.

Every person is layered, as is every existence, and every story or image carries many stories. Thinking about existence is often looking back to the past as the present or places that connect her to her whole being. It is not about where we came from but where we are going. Faryda Moumouh remains fascinated by history, philosophy, art, migration, identity, (dis)connection, alienation, (un)readability, (un)visibility, geography and various themes that touch her personally as well as move her. Faryda Moumouh engages - through her camera - in a dialogue with a chaotic world that seems to be falling apart more, completely unravelling and dislocating itself. This chaos or visible ambiguity becomes an inspiration, which she tries to elaborate and project visually in her unique visual language and series.

The suggestive or associative nature is never far away. Each image is elaborated or manipulated with analogue as digital techniques, materials within a single frame or series. Mixed media and photographic manipulation go hand in hand in Faryda Moumouh's non-conformist visual language.

The camera is the sketching tool, with which Faryda Moumouh observes the world and manipulates it to her liking. She departs from her gaze, on foot, by bike, by train. Like an invisible, looking from her biotope and the camera records an environment that becomes elusive and unreadable. That noise becomes a visual reflection in her images. A world that carries with it a complexity perhaps peculiar to this zeitgeist. A world that connects as it blinds, isolates as it confuses and has a dissolving effect on a society as a collective and individual.

Faryda Moumouh explores a photographic stratification that she deliberately manipulates and rebuilds. A fluid illegibility as a guide, becomes a clear, visual landmark. In a contrarian way, she likes to puncture the technical limitations of one image from a world not made by one image. Nothing can be captured from a single point of view. Piercing the one-dimensional gaze as an artist, is a major goal. The power of alienation is the negation of perception and brings it to new(re)constructions. Associative thinking influences the way she looks and selects. She makes crossovers between different layers and meanings, inside as well as outside the photographic image.

It is a tension between breaking down new layers in images as well as building up and restoring them. The deconstruction becomes a reconstruction, as a visual translation of a visible miscommunication in a society.

The Tower of Babel is a current concept, due to confusion and Cancel culture on many digital platforms. These echochambers or digital reflections, seem to be reflected into the (real) physical world. Everything is reconstructed away according to everyone's truth, opinion, or point of view. The photographic image as a starting point and nothing more ... digging into the layering of an image, in dialogue with other images as its own projection of that unclear, impenetrable if unreadable environment.

Translated with DeepL.com

'She wants to get under the skin of the visible world, drill down to the abstract and unknowable essence that gives direction to all the visual noise around us. Instead of boning out the image, she multiplies and mixes it, creating a seemingly indecipherable complexity. And precisely where her work threatens to lose connection with the photographed image, meaning emerges.

"Fluid ambiguity" is the word the Belgian photographer herself uses to describe her work. There are layers in it that cannot always be separated. Together, they set an atmosphere and give rise to associations and narratives. It is visual polyphony that demands careful navigation on the part of the viewer.

Translated with DeepL.com