19 - Mallory Lowe Mpoka - Cosmologies of the Heiresses

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

Mallory Lowe Mpoka’s proposal comprises four works in dialogue, through which the artist approaches the image as an active space for the construction, shifting and transmission of identity. A Belgian-Cameroonian artist, Mpoka develops a multidisciplinary practice in which she never isolates photography, but constantly reconfigures it through weaving, materials, and gestures, until it becomes an embodied and situated image. For her, the purpose of an image is not to faithfully reproduce the past, but to activate it. Drawing on fragmentary family archives, orally transmitted stories and speculative projections, her practice questions how images contribute to the formation of the self, particularly in contexts characterized by colonial rupture, migration and the erasure of memories. The image thus becomes a place of passage: between generations, between bodies, and between intimate and collective history. In In the Weft of Memory, photographs and self-portraits intertwine with the Jacquard weave, transforming the textile into a medium of matrilineal continuity. The photographic series Trilogia, produced after the artist was designated as the new matriarch of her family, explores the practice of weaving as a process of transmission between women. Meanwhile, the diptych Procession I and Procession II brings to light the silences of a fragmented history, that of the fierce war waged by colonial France against Cameroonian independence fighters in the Bamiléké region. By introducing visual disturbances such as beads, embroidery and weavings into archival photographs, Mpoka creates breaks in patterns that resonate with these historical silences. Finally, the film She Who Summons offers a moving, invocatory image: a ritual dance between two women that turns the body into a medium of memory. Through this body of work, Mpoka deploys a conception of the image as living matter that is woven, fragmented, and performed. The ensemble thus reveals a shifting visual truth located at the intersection of the self, the body, and fragments of memory and history. Nadine Hounkpatin