In Ixelles, one of Brussels’ most vibrant neighborhoods, there is something that recalls Brooklyn. Low-rise houses with still-manageable rents, friendly bars on every corner, chic yet accessible restaurants serving excellent food, a sharp-witted youth culture, and a resolutely cosmopolitan crowd. Ideal conditions for a flourishing artistic scene—one that appears far more dynamic than those of many other European capitals—and that comes together during events that feel more like gatherings for exchanging ideas than business cards.
The photographic community, for its part, convenes every three months at the Hangar, the epicenter of this creative emulsion. Photo Brussels Festival 2026 opens there with the largest exhibition of this edition: “The House” by Lee Shulman, developed with The Anonymous Project and presented for the first time in Belgium. From the moment visitors enter, it becomes clear that this is not an exhibition in the conventional sense. Here, images are not simply hung on walls—they inhabit a fully reconstructed domestic space. A kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, a hallway, a caravan. Each room hosts vernacular photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, integrated into the setting like memories left behind.
The initiator of the project, Lee Shulman, emphasizes this desire to create an experience rather than a traditional display: “I wanted visitors to feel like they were entering a home, not a museum. These images were made to exist in an interior, not on white walls.” Collected over more than ten years around the world, the photographs come from anonymous slides often found at flea markets, on eBay, or in private archives. They depict ordinary scenes: family meals, children playing in the garden, summer holidays, moments of celebration.
“At the time, photographing was an intimate, almost invisible gesture,” Shulman recalls. “These images were not meant to be seen by strangers. They were part of everyday life, like a piece of furniture or an object placed on a shelf.” By reintegrating them into a familiar environment, “The House” restores their original function: that of traces of ordinary lives.
First presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2019, the exhibition has since been shown in several international institutions, with the success for which it is known. It also resonates particularly at the Hangar. “It’s an exhibition about collective memory, built from very simple gestures,” explains Delphine Dumont, director of the Hangar. “It reminds us that family photography is one of the foundations of our relationship to images.”
Directly extending “The House,” the Hangar presents “Family Stories,” a collective exhibition that approaches family from multiple contemporary perspectives. Here, anonymity gives way to asserted narratives—sometimes painful, often complex. The exhibition brings together seven artists whose work interrogates filiation, transmission, loss, and the reconstruction of family bonds.
For Delphine Dumont, the dialogue between the two exhibitions is essential: “The House speaks of an almost universal collective memory, while Family Stories gives voice to singular, situated, sometimes conflicted stories. One feeds the other.” The artists use photography as a tool to revisit their own histories, often over long periods of time.
Among them, Deanna Dikeman presents images from her series “Leaving and Waving” (1991–2017). For more than 25 years, she photographed her parents each time she left the family home—always from the car, always at the moment of saying goodbye. This repetitive, almost banal gesture becomes a poignant narrative of time passing. “I never intended to make a series,” she explains. “It was simply a way of keeping a trace.”
With Sanne De Wilde, family appears as a shifting territory, traversed by questions of perception and normality. Known for her work around difference and neurodiversity, the Belgian artist approaches family history as a space where identities are sometimes built against the grain. Her images deliberately blur visual markers, playing with blur, color, and staging. “I’m not trying to show an objective reality,” she explains, “but a way of being in the world—subjective, unstable, often misunderstood.”
The other artists—Alma Haser, Danilo Zocatelli Cesco, Francesca Hummler, and Cristóbal Ascencio—also explore family as an unstable territory, crossed by visible or invisible inheritances, notably Lee Daesung, who examines family ties through his own personal history, staging close figures and everyday situations where intimacy also becomes a form of play. The images in “Family Stories” evoke bodies, faces, houses, but also absences. Together, they sketch a sensitive cartography of family bonds, without idealization or nostalgia.
This reflection on intimacy continues in the Hangar Gallery space with the solo exhibition by Sylvie Bonnot, “Le Royaume des moustiques” (The Kingdom of Mosquitoes), a series already seen at Paris Photo last November. Emerging from research conducted over several years in French Guiana, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, the series is rooted in close observation of bodies, soils, and everyday gestures. “For me, the mosquito is a sentinel,” the artist explains. “It reveals the fragility of bodies and territories, but also their capacity for adaptation.”
Sylvie Bonnot’s work stands out for its experimental photographic approach, in which the materiality of the image itself is directly engaged, forming something like a snake’s skin after shedding. “I push the photographic print to its limits,” she explains. “There is a kind of exhaustion of the material that echoes what I observe in the field.” Often presented as diptychs, the images combine fragments of landscape, bodily details, and portraits. Anchored in the voices of those who live in the forest, “Le Royaume des moustiques” avoids any exoticizing gaze. “I always work from the words of the people who live there.”
Stories rooted in territories
Leaving the Hangar, Photo Brussels Festival spreads across the city like a constellation. The exhibitions do not respond to imposed themes, but to a shared attention to lived narratives, individual trajectories, and traversed territories. In Brussels, photography thus circulates from one place to another without rupture, continuing the thread opened by family stories and anchoring itself in broader experiences—sometimes intimate, sometimes political, often both.
At La Nombreuse, “Another Love Story” by Karla Hiraldo Voleau originates in an intimate rupture. The project was born after the end of a long relationship marked by the betrayal of her partner, whom the artist chooses to designate as X. “I discovered he was cheating on me,” she recounts. “At that moment, everything collapsed.” Rather than closing this chapter, Karla Hiraldo Voleau decided to make it the starting point of a photographic work. She scrolls through the photo roll on her phone, revisiting places they shared, rereading messages, gathering traces, transcribing a phone conversation with “the other woman,” and constructing a fragmented narrative where images dialogue with text, silence, and absence.
The series seeks neither immediate repair nor distance. “I didn’t want to explain or justify,” she specifies. “I wanted to stay in that moment of imbalance.” The photographs oscillate between closeness and withdrawal, showing bodies, objects, and spaces permeated by the memory of the relationship. By naming her former partner X, the artist refuses to give him a stable face while acknowledging his persistent imprint. “Another Love Story,” already shown at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York, thus becomes the story of a slow reconstruction, where photography serves as a tool to confront ordeal.
This attention to zones of silence is echoed at Entry Gallery. “Den Silencio” by Jaïr Marc Castillo is rooted in a life marked by constant displacement. Born in Curaçao, the artist grew up in perpetual movement, from Venezuela to Aruba, then from the Netherlands to Belgium. “I was born on an island, Curaçao, and I was always moving,” he explains. This geographic instability becomes the foundation of his photographic work, conceived as an ongoing search for belonging, identity, and origins. “Everything is moving, because I’m also moving,” he adds, describing a state of wandering that never truly ends. “These images represent for me the time of belonging, the diaspora, the identity.”
At Fondation A, “ExPose RePose CounterPose” by Tarrah Krajnak shifts these questions toward the body and the history of images. Curated by Sonia Voss, the exhibition interrogates the codes of photographic representation, particularly those inherited from colonial and modernist photography. “Tarrah Krajnak always works from her own position,” explains Sonia Voss. “Her body becomes a critical tool.” Born in Peru and adopted in the United States, Krajnak anchors her practice in a personal exploration of identity and belonging. She reappropriates existing photographic gestures, reenacts them, and diverts them. “I can’t position myself outside of history,” she says. “I work from within.” Her exclusive use of analog processes and manual printing reinforces the physical and committed dimension of her work.
At Geopolis, photography takes on an explicitly historical dimension with “Ukraine in Resistance” by Oleksandr Glyadyelov. The photographer has been documenting his country for more than 30 years. His images span Ukraine’s independence, popular uprisings, years of tension, and the war triggered by the Russian invasion. “I photograph what I know,” he explains. “I photograph where I live.” For Ulrich Huygevelde, coordinator of Geopolis, the importance of the exhibition lies in its duration: “This work doesn’t begin in 2022. It shows a long history, made up of successive resistances.” Glyadyelov’s photographs depict war without spectacle: faces, exhausted bodies, moments of pause. Violence is present, but never isolated from the everyday life it permeates.
This attention to communities and territories continues at L’Enfant Sauvage with “Cat Island Blues” by Katherine Longly. Produced over several years, the project documents a tiny, isolated Japanese island—Aoshima—one kilometer long and bathed by the waters of the Seto Inland Sea. At its peak in the 1940s, the island counted nearly 900 inhabitants, most of whom lived from fishing. The population then rapidly declined. In 2013, it became—despite itself—a popular tourist attraction for its large colony of cats. Today, only three elderly residents and around forty aging felines remain. But what happened on Aoshima? The artist recounts her experience on the island, from the surprise at the gap between tourist images that had drawn her there and reality, to the deep attachment she developed to the place. “What interested me was the way people continue to live despite uncertainty,” she explains. The images alternate between portraits and scenes of daily life, depicting a community bound together by the fragility of its territory.
A major revelation in recent years, Jesse Willems presents “Luz” at Schönfeld Gallery. The Belgian artist, born in Antwerp in 1984, starts from photographs taken in the street, often while traveling, which he then reworks to extract their essence. The scenes are stripped of overly precise narrative elements: what remains are forms, colors, and fragments of space. The resulting collages recall Matisse and do not tell a story in the traditional sense, but invite viewers to look differently at what surrounds them—photography as a space of calm and attention.
At the Michèle Schoonjans Gallery, “Beyond the Horizon” by Scarlett Hooft Graafland offers a shift in perspective. The Dutch artist works exclusively with analog photography, creating her images through staged performances in extreme landscapes. “Everything happens on site,” recalls Michèle Schoonjans. “There is no digital manipulation.” The images play with perception while remaining anchored in real, inhabited places, crossed by human presence. At Spazio Nobile Gallery, “Panoramic, 15 years of Art Photography” looks back at the work of Frederik Vercruysse, marked by constant attention to architecture and spaces of power. His images, often stripped down, question how places shape behaviors and uses.
Finally, at Vue Gallery, “Mom is here” by Julie Scheurweghs brings the gaze back to the domestic sphere. The project documents motherhood without idealization. “I wanted to show what is not always shown,” the artist explains. The images, deeply moving, depict daily life with a child—fatigue, extreme closeness—inscribing motherhood within lived time, far from normative representations.
The 10th edition of Photo Brussels Festival runs until February 21, 2026, across the Belgian capital. More information about the Hangar is available here.
