Portraits Style Congo explores the links between Belgium’s colonial history, Art Nouveau architecture, and the representation of Afro-descendant Belgians.
The series was photographed inside emblematic Art Nouveau buildings in Brussels, including the Horta Museum, built in 1898 by and for architect Victor Horta, and the Hôtel van Eetvelde, designed by Horta in 1895 for Edmond van Eetvelde, General Administrator of the Congo Free State.
These buildings are usually approached through the history of architecture and the decorative arts. Yet they also belong to a period marked by Belgium’s colonial expansion and by the circulation of wealth and raw materials extracted from the Congo. Through portraiture, I wanted to introduce another presence into these spaces and question the histories they embody.
The people photographed belong to different generations of Afro-descendant Belgians. Some carry intimate and direct experiences connected to colonialism and its aftermath, while for younger generations, this history can appear more distant, transmitted through family narratives, silences, fragments, and traces.
By placing these bodies within spaces historically associated with power, wealth, and colonial history, Portraits Style Congo proposes a symbolic reappropriation of this architectural heritage. The portraits create a tension between the people represented and the spaces surrounding them, while raising a simple but fundamental question: to whom does this heritage belong today?
The work also reflects on visibility and representation. It seeks to make Afro-descendant communities present within places from which their histories have often been absent, despite the historical connections between these buildings and the Congo.
The project resonates with Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950, in which he explored historical portraits of Black South Africans who used photography as a means of self-representation and social affirmation. In Portraits Style Congo, portraiture similarly becomes a space in which history, identity, and representation can be reconsidered.
Rather than attempting to resolve the contradictions contained within this heritage, the series brings different histories into the same image. The photographs ask what happens when those who have historically been placed outside the dominant narrative occupy its spaces and look back at us.
About Chrystel Mukeba
Chrystel Mukeba (b. 1983) is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels who works primarily with analogue processes. Her practice explores memory, transmission, and identity through intimate narratives in which personal histories intersect with broader collective contexts. Through portraiture, landscapes, and fragments of everyday life, she pays particular attention to light, detail, and ordinary gestures.
Her photographs explore territories of childhood, family relationships, and the traces that time leaves on people and places, questioning how memory is constructed, transformed, and transmitted across generations. Her work has been exhibited in Belgium and internationally and is held in the collections of FOMU in Antwerp and KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels.
Portraits Style Congo will be presented as part of KANAL–Centre Pompidou’s opening exhibition, A Truly Immense Journey, which opens on 26 November 2026. [Official Website]
