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 more than 25 years, seeking her personal and visual language in the photographic medium, a silver jubilee. Her prior training and studies in Art Schools as De Kunsthumaniora, photography as an evening course of six years and a fulltime education at Sint Lucas Antwerp, have liberated her thinking.

A Master in the Visual Arts gave her the strength and autonomy to fully stand up for herself and follow her own unique path. It was not self-evident and a struggle, 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 and power as human being and artist.

Every person is layered,every existence, and 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. Faryda Moumouh has liberated the photographic image. It is an artistic (re)search to a creative practice. Her work has been seen at multiple exhibitions and fairs such as the International Photo Fair Unseen Amsterdam.

With a mix of intuitive and experimental images, she connects the world inside and out. 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.

"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.

Quand l’age d’or est devenu noir?

Les femmes en silence, 2025

Text by Faryda Moumouh - series L'Age d'or, femmes en silence - 2025

L'age D'or or the golden age of photography is the 19th-century development of the medium of photography in Britain as France. It was a true revolution as a visual and artistic earth shift. Even the painter felt threatened by the photographic image. And just entered dialogue with this new medium. This golden age of photography of both a mental and technical change, also became the way of looking at a world.

'A world that was captured ‘objectively’ and depicted mechanically'.

Because all this was so technically underpinned, with the development of light-sensitive carriers in dialogue with technical viewing devices and lenses, photography in the 19th century was a masculine occupation. Scientists, engineers, eye specialists and artists joined forces to arrive at a viewing device that perceived the world as the eye did but could also definitively capture that world on (light-)sensitive paper.

The 19th-century photographer was male except for a few female photographers. These photographers had the opportunity to depict and capture their surroundings thanks to photography. This environment from this golden age becomes a male world approached with an observational gaze from a male point of view. The 19th-century gaze is a white, European, male gaze that is allowed and able to look at that world in its privileged way.

The male photographer went out with his heavy, wooden camera and tripod. A visual appearance in the streets of the 19th century, a crazy and idiosyncratic one, sometimes hidden under a black, light-proof cloth to view the world and focus on the glass plate. A world that was literally frozen in perception. The technical limitation of a long shutter speed determined the various subjects that were quite static or did not move.

This gave many European capitals the chance to be captured as a photograph and memory for the whole family back home. Nice images to be further reproduced as real tourist destinations or attractions for the new bourgeoisie who were also looking for their Europe just like the rich nobility and their own Grand Tour. And is the male photographer a silent but visible observer and he and his camera observe the world from a detached point of view. The technical limitation of such an unwieldy camera with heavy tripod, literally created a physical distance between viewer and observer and the subject or object.

This male gaze became the gaze to the world. He gave the visual translation of his gaze to cities, locations, subjects, architecture, historical heritage, classical sites, local rituals, and objects and, if technically possible, human figures. These human figures were also captured from a distance or photographed in a daylight studio, with the emphatic request to ‘stand still’ and not move.

The entire 19th-century photography or so-called truthful documents were a privileged gaze of the white man. To what extent is photography still truly objective? Visual culture has for too long been a one-sided gaze throughout history. Male perception became the nor and the objective gaze. And showed cultural perception as the gaze towards European as non-European cultures.

'The male, white gaze became the secular gaze.'

Of I versus the other. Which over time also became a judgmental gaze. A gaze of race, ethnicity, exoticism, and orientalism. But also, a racial gaze that of a class system with a distinction between race, descent, and origin. And thus becomes a racial view of the world and its cultural diversity shaped as a stereotypical image or norm. Norm and a one-dimensional view. One kind of people, one kind of group, one kind of ethnicity, one kind... Not nuance but also not their gaze or their perception. Not their story being visualized. They are claimed photographically and become visual property of the Western, white male gaze.

Non-European cultures are cultivated from a kind of curiosity, exoticism as a kind of object of study, an object to be examined and recorded. No emphasis on the personal or human aspect behind these exotic objects but (judging) from that white, Western white gaze. Other cultures were approached exotically as sometimes erotic. Approached from a distance and ‘objectified’. Lesser people with more primitive values...Or they were used as ‘illustrations’ by stereotypical renderings and depicted in stereotypical costumes. From object to possession captured in the chemistry of photography. Without realizing what the photographic image would be concretely, what its function was or possibly destination.

The male (white) gaze became the frame of reference to understand, follow and portray the world. This new medium became a revolutionary technique that began to shape European as exotic visual culture, seeking to broaden the gaze on the one hand as an imposition. With above the counter sales of portraits, landscapes, city views, architecture as applications in academia and the development of new technical variants such as ‘stereo photography’. Below the counter, an ‘illegal’ circuit of photography with pornographic if erotic overtones emerged.

The 19th-century gaze is the gaze of the settler, the dominator, the possessor. This realization changes the viewing of photography from this century. This world and photographic documents become less objective and selective in perception and experience. And makes us experience the exoticism of that 19th century differently.

'A blind spot hangs over that golden age of photography.'

Yet there were studious women photographers in this golden age of photography like Julia Margaret Cameron, Anna Atkins, Margaret Bourke-White, Frances Benjamin Johnston with their own unique and feminine outlook. Silent witnesses to a 19th-century world all around. Who only got their final place in photography history in the 20th century to even 21st century.

I went digging myself into that photographic period from the 19th century, where the ‘Moroccan Woman’ was depicted as objects and curiosities. Photographed by white men behind their camera. One theme was even called ‘La femme Marocainne’. Perhaps a glorification of the exotic or Middle Eastern woman. The other woman who seems distant and unattainable from the male gaze, of course. As if the woman could be captured in one image? But did this woman ask to be photographed? They are silent women, silently looking at a strange machine, with a man behind it. Not knowing what is happening.

That silence, that silent and passive undergoing, is what touches me in those photographs. A silent and passive attitude in that silent humble body language to just undergo. The photographer visually scanning the anonymous subject, watching, examining from behind his wooden camera. The Moroccan woman is observed and captured. With a double undertone of object and visual subject. Not asking the women whether they want to be caught in the image, the camera or male gaze?

Whether covered with a veil or not. Captured in the street scene or just the day-light studio. With a man alone in the room or not? Was there a brother present to supervise, was there a father ... the female perception from a male gaze that ‘The Moroccan Woman’ of the 19th century wanted to capture.... These women - in their alienation to the medium of photography - were placed in front of the camera. Did they ever see the image or print of the negative and look at it themselves? Did they know the visual translation of their appearance, their being, their bodies, and their visual appearance? They disappeared into anonymity, with no name or real subjective identity. They were reduced to a curiosity, an ethnic object, a woman of another culture. Another country, a foreign origin...

These women are forever stuck in that anonymity of the photographic past. Even the photographers are untraceable. Anonymity as identity. We will never know who they were, neither the photographer nor the women in front of the cameras. Making these women subjective remains an impossible task. They could have been my former sisters or aunts... as new persons, I link them back to my background or story. A group photo taken from the past with anonymous images from the history of 19th-century photography. Giving these women back a place in the photographic image.

A connecting of the 19th century with the 21st century. Connecting a woman and combining a female gaze with a female self-portrait that is also enclosed in anonymity by veils and dark glasses. I disappear along in time and the past to see myself as a shadow dissolved in the photographic image and anonymity of these women.

"Ik zag mezelf als schaduw die geen zin had." Quote van Fernando Pessoa

Still a life, 2025

Text by Faryda Moumouh - Series Still a life, 2025

‘Still a life’ is a layered if personal title. This one speaks of the power of still being alive. Though it is also about the urge to persevere and fight. It is a reflection to a post-it that I intuitively wrote down as a human being. After my better half ended up in the ICU.

The urge to grasp life (again) and fight for everything you hold dear. Even though at that moment you experience an instinct or primal force and function on autopilot. There is also a sense of survival. How life challenges us again to keep going from a subconscious way of being. My life stood still but society raced on. We are all still living forces, though the confrontation has also been hard with how there is little time to really stand still.

'Our society has no time to stand still.'

We must keep up or we will fall silent or be overturned and crushed. The need to stand still was then a real necessity. Even if this was only for three months. The rush was reactivated afterwards, as if you could take on the world again, though in retrospect this seems to have been a complete illusion. This series just seeks stillness, seeks peace, seeks fragility, vulnerability, and reflection.

The works therefore also become layered ‘still life’. Nothing constitutes a more beautiful metaphor for standing still in life as a photograph. A pure snapshot from a life. A precious representation of time frozen. A memory immortalized in the image. That was once the power of the photographic medium, standing still and freezing time as something that no longer moves. The moving becomes static and seems to dwell in the same mode forever.

The photographic medium now seems to be more a more swallowed up in the chaos of time and fleeting digital files that are scrolled on but no longer viewed, only consumed by a very compelling if fleeting gaze. Social media has transformed a photo as a fleeting jpg to see even more images in a single minute's time. The photo becomes an impression of an impression. The photo is a blurred file that is forgotten after 30 seconds. The memory is a fleeting shadow in the distance.

The confrontation with death and, thankfully, life, literally makes a person stand still. Makes man in - see. We freeze in our own moment. Everything becomes relative and essence becomes necessity. These experiences make life meaningful and give strength. The stillness and vulnerability as pure resilience to recover, rest, undergo and follow the rhythm of the body. This work is a philosophical if humanistic approach about the quiet life, or still-life. Works form a memory like a real still life, constructed from everyday objects, linked to a photograph as a remnant of a moment. The photograph is the physical link of frozen time.

This work is an organic follow-up to the series ‘At 22:21 PM’ (At 11:21PM), where the moment of life and death but also struggle is depicted.

This series is the philosophical and personal visual reflection on time afterwards. When in parallel universe seems to function between stasis and speed, between calm and chaos, between remembering and letting go, between progress and stagnation, between present or the moment and the future. Capturing life as a still life. Need for peace, calmness, distress, and timelessness and undergo the transience and fragility of life.

The alienation with your own self, your own fragile moments and experiences as the pressure and indifferent approach of society as an environment. Not feeling understood in how life just now dares to throw itself back on itself just because death hung over life like a second, but thankfully driven back thanks to the urge to live and the instinct to survive.

In such a moment, life becomes small and humble, with moments just a natural collection of mundane actions. The moment of getting up and caring as a cup of coffee, a moment of walking, turning a corner. A moment of waking up and living this realization to the full. Suddenly, simple actions become a constant hold. A stable factor in a struggle for life. A steady rhythm of simple habits emerges that just give comfort and strength. Life as a quiet life, built on routines. Reduced to the essentials. A heavy but also rewarding awareness and experience. Which are then photographically elaborated into personal quiet lives.

The urge for this inner silence is a task to think and work with even further. To see this sensitive experience as a period of strength and vulnerability, (re)recognize it and work this out visually to arrive at a positive and constructive story. To also hold on to this strength and not be swept away in the rush of these times.

My camera is my guide and my moment of stillness. It is my personal tool to express everything visually. To connect myself with that rat-race but at the same time to grab hold of and engage in a dialogue with anyone who dares to stand still with the image. As the name suggests, a still life is a representation of a still piece of everyday life.

Still alive, a life.

"De stillevenruimte draagt de eerste basismetafoor van de eindigheid: het verdwijnen. Deze metafoor activeert en mobiliseert de tweede primitieve eindigheidsmetafoor die het leven van de dingen zelf is: het vergaan."

"Het stilleven vertelt het eenvoudige verhaal van wat de tijd doet met mensen en dingen. Het portretteert niet het ding of de dingelijkheid, maar vertelt en toont wat er met de dingen gebeurt. In het atelier van de schilder liggen de dingen misschien stil, maar in zijn beeld bewegen ze."

Reconstructed Views, 2024

Text by Faryda Moumouh - Series Transcultural Layers, 2024

‘Transcultural Layers’ is a visual reconstruction of various created images in dialogue with your own personally collected objects such as sand and stones from various countries. Collecting earth and soil from various places around the world. Is a way of being connected to places I visit on the one hand. On the other hand, it is a physical proof of having been somewhere as putting into perspective the concept of ‘soil, origin, geography and wanting to be physically connected to one specific place.

The camera is another sketching tool to connect me with memories and experiences. The viewer and collector of visual moments in time. As a photographer, I am also a collector in images, searching and groping for an image that can further grow and transform into another image. My being is reconstructed time and again by encounters, places, people, and experiences. Translating these into visual responses are partly the force and urge to get a grip on that complex world with the camera.

'My perception is always in motion and never definitive or determined by the decisive moment.'

Constructing as well as deconstructing images, form a basis towards a personal if authentic visual language. I see life as something organic that is not static so my perception can never be static either but is in motion. The series Transcultural Layers is a visual response to this. I am shaped as a person and individual by so many layers, experiences in visual as well as content input.

Cultural backgrounds are shaped from various inputs such as parents, grandparents, friends, family, upbringing, places, religion, experiences, encounters everywhere and more through study, education and cultural baggage such as literature, art and philosophy. Life is a construction that can be reconstructed all the time. Identities like experiences are also built up and sometimes broken down again, layer by layer. Each person or individual is constructed in this way and carries his or her stories and identities with him or her.

No story is pure or concretely defined. Everyone is hybrid, vague and blurred and layered in construction. Just as a history or society is a collection of stories and becomes a multicultural representation that is indeed complex in construction. Layers that are visible but also invisible, shared as hidden. The reconstruction of thousands of pieces that emerge together and so continue to exist in the photographic image.

Purging identities can lead to new ways of compartmentalizing. People want to get a grip on the world around them, which is perceived to be very chaotic. Nothing is clear or bright and everything is confusing. Getting a grip on that confusion is what people seem to be looking for more. This has led us back to single-minded thinking and name-calling. Purging people by their identity, religion, ethnicity, gender, also demarcates them to mainly that one name or identity. Is this the solution to the chaos in this world. Reduce people to a specific meaning and no longer convey that complex stratification or diverse stories.

I embrace that chaos, that hybrid world in all its complexities and try to visually depict that ambiguity in the series Transcultural Layers. Where the world is constantly in transition and shaped by each person with his or her story as background, making everything constantly changing.

"De precieze denker

Wiens ziel in duizend stukken ligt,

Duizend stukken die niet eens bestaan..."

Quote van Fernando Pessoa

De complexiteit van een realiteit, 2023

Text by Faryda Moumouh - Series Complexity of a reality, 2023

Reality has become a complex world. Politicians tell their ‘own’ truths because facts have become relative. Chaos leads to alienation from that reality. Parallel worlds seem to be fighting each other. The world seems to be in transition, and we are evolving into bickering howlers, tearing each other down, insulting, mocking, belittling each other to maintain some self-assertion and ego in this way. This, of course, is made easy by all the social media platforms. And this complex world is becoming more and more black and white. A world where thinking only seems to grow or evolve towards a pattern of thinking between good and bad, me and the other, us and them....

'A world that isolated in compartments, the worldview seems to form.'

Perhaps even the word ‘Worldview’ has passed and seems to belong to the 20th century, where a society was still naive to believe in worlds with different images that gave each other space to be.

Reality has become harsh, without nuance or softness. A complex collection of petty frustrations, hatred, distrust and suspicion. Was the starting point a start around 2001, when we faced, as a world, heavy terror and we were suddenly in a new world, after 9/11? This world has been the start of polarization. A world for or against us as the then US President G. Bush Jr spoke. And yes, those images are burned into our retinas. An image that can even be perceived as Hollywoodian, created in the studios. The Twin-towers in New York were deliberately pierced by two passenger planes. They caught fire and collapsed like pure houses of cards. Black silhouettes jumped out of windows to their deaths. A world that suddenly became very black and white indeed. This atrocity could never be defended and was indeed a symbolic attack on the Free West and the United States.

Suddenly, immigrant groups were miserably reduced to their faith or just religious identity. The Muslims and this group were suddenly held accountable on a whole world scale. The Muslims, an entire group reduced to their religion, how narrow-minded could we be in the West. As if such a complex group of diverse people with immigrant roots could suddenly be nothing or mean nothing? What about atheist immigrants, what about shocked immigrants, who also experienced those terror attacks as traumatic...

As if one-dimensional thinking suddenly takes over. And an entire group only coincides with their religion? The dehumanization has begun...

But a free world is complex, is layered and is grey with many nuances of greys to black and white. A true color map that seeks to represent all tones and shades. A world where we as individuals are allowed space to be or become ourselves gives a diverse and various worldview or worldviews. With many colors and backgrounds that make up a society.

A democratic world is difficult, confusing, and complicated precisely because every vote counts, every point of view counts, every opinion counts...every nuance can make a difference. A democratic worldview is an open world where everyone is more than one identity. Democracy is at times a collection of many views coexisting. Is this easy? Of course not, an easy world is an authoritarian or dictatorial world, where one person speaks and dictates for everyone else.

If we want to defend democracy and freedom and autonomy, we need nuance and stratification. Do we need dialogue and opportunities to welcome people with open minds and let them be. No more imposed images but ever new dialogues and bridges, crossover thinking and reinforcing each other.

Letting every view or perception enter a dialogue with every other view or perception and learning to accept that complex world and (re)recognize just that complexity as evidence of ‘democracy’. Post Modern thinking gave me as a student in the 1990s, the hope and freedom to be just who I wanted to be. A world that could understand, acknowledge, and embrace every story alongside the other. Every story was told. Every vision was shared, without a fear of being cancelled.

I had hopes as a student that we saw more and more the individual as a link to the collective and that these two forces could reinforce each other. Standing strong in a collective community just by chance to be yourself as a full individual.

In the 21st century, these two forces seem to be killing each other? The collective of group, nation and identity seems to be taking over completely. We form our own collective little club through all sorts of digital platforms where, in our safe little club, we continue to affirm and no longer question each other's visions. As a human and artist, I am worried about the future and democratic thinking. Groupthink is taking over as strength, back on individual strength. I feel we can no longer cope with the complex democratic society. Can't handle the complexity of a diverse society anymore? And to get this back under control are simplifying everything. The simple one-liners, the simple sentences, boutades, without meaning, story or depth are taking over again. A world reduced in content to a phrase or icon.

No more openness and no more dialogue but tribalism like truly primal people of the past. Tribes being jazzed up towards each other. Where are we headed? Can we no longer educate our primal brain so that we can handle the complex world around back. The hybrid view in which we continuously improve ourselves. We should dare to stand back in the world or society. Seeing each other as links and bridges in dialogue with each other. But the urge to flee from that world, into a safe bubble, seems more and more to be a new reality. We seem more and more to be a society of different small societies that seem to live deliberately side by side. A democratic model of separate groups wanting to coexist alienated from each other. is this indeed the only solution?

I hope back, to the exchange of stories, glimpses and observations that feed each other and can become a kind of cross-pollination just as each image in this series is a visual cross-pollination between different realities and perceptions. And many experiences just become the enrichment of the gaze.

Robert Rauschenberg, let the world in ...

“I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.”

Robert Rauschenberg

Let the world in, is a series of works by American artist Robert Rauschenberg, which form a kind of soulmate to my own visual view of the world. He made immense canvases, combines and objects as translations of his world and his gaze.

As an artist, I remembered him as a crucial transitional figure between Abstract Expressionism started in the 1950s to the uninhibited Pop Art or New Realists, how they first called themselves, in the 1960s.

Robert Rauschenberg was somewhat in the background after my studies in the late 1990s. Since I have been searching for a visual projection of myself and the world as an environment, I purposefully experience and view various glimpses as views towards the world as towards myself. A mix of new images that become a new translation in dialogue with each other, within the same image frame. Images (re)constructing and overlapping each other.

I suddenly felt an intuitive kinship with Robert Rauschenberg's work after rediscovering it by chance. I saw his work back in a small gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany. His work led to a visual if inner connection with what I was making. It became a communication between myself and his work, a communication between myself and Robert where his work becomes the bridge between my world and his world. A visual conversation between images is his strength, how he put the world into his work and let each viewer project his or her world into the world he was collecting. Trying to visualize the noise all around is our common being in a time of change and chaos.

An invisible link or connection to an artist through his own works, which is no longer there. Which has suddenly become alive again through his traces in his own artistic work. He is purposeful if intuitive in construction of his layered images that are also a crossover between various images whether self-created or not, often collected and transformed into photogravures or possibly silkscreens, which he manually printed on canvases.

The photographic image becomes a starting point that is also brought into dialogue with his object art as painting. He experiments with the concept of mixed media to shape his individuality and personal visual language. His frame of reference was certainly his environment and country, the United States of America. American society was also strongly challenged by the opposition to the existing segregation system. The early 1960s was a time of innovation, technology, progress, and hope that was totally disrupted in the late 1960s.

Even that American Dream, became subject to all kinds of critical impressions, civic movements and social changes that created both human and political, a lot of chaos and confusion because for the first time, also the gaze of Afro-Americans, became visible as important public figures like Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X. The American Dream was woefully only the prerogative of white Americans... And yes, American society was rightly criticized by all kinds of protest movements as civic groups. America was confronted to look in its own mirror and put its own society under the magnifying glass. These 1960s, in the 20th century, became important link years for further emancipation thoughts in all walks of life. And everything echoes even further, in this 21st century.

Perhaps recognizable to the chaos and resistance as protests in our time or our 21st century? A revival as a rediscovery of his way of communicating, images combined into his ‘Combines’. He played with objects, paintings and photography. Where everyday reality became a strong input in his oeuvre. Urban themes like topics from newspapers or news, became sources of inspiration. Later, this evolved into a mix of personal as well as impersonal elements coming together. He drew inspiration from everything he came across.

Rediscovering his work became a push forward to continue to develop my own work and find a strength in how he made his works. It is a visual and intuitive kinship that gives an inner strength to my own oeuvre as a work.

Robert Rauschenberg invited the world into his studio, life, and work. He made the bridge between life, society, and art. He was generous and open and shared everything with everyone. He stood in the world, in his existence and his surroundings.

Robert Rauschenberg and The ROCI Series = Cross Cultural understanding through art - takin, making, and exchanging art and fact around the world.

"I am for an art that is political-erotic-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum."

Robert Rauschenberg