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Fotomuseum Antwerpen - FOMU

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België
Antwerp
Fotomuseum Antwerpen - FOMU

Het FOMU - Fotomuseum Antwerpen biedt fotografie in al haar facetten.
(810)

Fototentoonstellingen, rondleidingen, workshops, events, een eigen collectie en nog veel meer.

27/05/2026

All is not what it seems in this image. Or****ic Man (1969) is part of a triptych depicting men at different stages of sexual gratification. As in all his portraits, Peter Hujar approaches his models with tenderness and intimacy.

Hujar (US, 1934– 1987) focused his lens on q***r communities, creating intimate portraits of friends, artists and lovers. He worked exclusively in black and white and used sober backgrounds, creating the impression of physical closeness to his subjects through a subtle play of shadow and movement.

This image is part of the FOMU collection and currently on show at FOMU as part of the Families exhibition. For the exhibition ‘Families’ we’re diving into the FOMU collection in search of family photos. In a time when motherhood, the nuclear family and the idea of ‘chosen family’ are being hotly debated, this exhibition offers a surprising look at a topic that affects us all.

Families
now on show at FOMU
Info & tickets: fomu.be

Image: Peter Hujar, Or****ic Man, 1969/2021 FOMU collection 2021/59 ©️ The Peter Hujar Archive

20/05/2026

‘If revolution is an illness, I want to be sick, sick, sick!’

Imagine arriving in a completely unfamiliar land. A place where others determine when you are deemed to belong. How could you ever feel at home? This is the experience evoked by Diane Severin Nguyen in IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS. Nguyen takes inspiration from political history and her own experiences of
diaspora.

In the film, we follow the coming-of-age story of Weronika Nguyen, a Vietnamese girl who literally washes ashore in Poland. We see her eating and training as a dancer, living a lonely existence. She must integrate to survive. Weronika joins a Polish dance group in Warsaw captivated by K-pop, the hugely popular Korean music genre. Does she need them or they her?

Diane Severin Nguyen makes work about identity, as well as the new forms propaganda can take. Is revolution in fact a process of ambiguity? Is it a youthful uncertainty that leads us to the streets, like a viral dance routine or the lyrics of a song?

Diane Severin Nguyen – IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS
On show until 07.06.2026
Info & tickets: fomu.be

16/05/2026

Whilst this image may appear as an abstract painting, the series ‘Painting the Town’ consists of photographic close-ups of painted-over boards covering storefront windows. In response to public protests following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in May 2020, business owners and police enforcement clad windows and door across the United States with plywood. This inadvertently provided surfaces for
resistance-based aesthetics of Black Lives Matter marches and demonstrations. The colored paint represents attempts to censor street art against racial violence, including slogans such as “I can’t breathe” and “No justice, no peace

“Everything was closed down. And the city responded by boarding up everything, from the courthouse to the public library to all of the businesses, all of the government agencies and city agencies. And then there was graffiti painted over all these things that had been boarded up by the protesters. And then the governor of the city, the mayor of the city, sent out a team of painters to paint all over the graffiti that had been applied to these walls” – Carrie Mae Weems

Weems confronts the systemic mechanisms of power that erase, silence, and conceal Black identities and perspectives in the public sphere. Through her
deliberate choices in framing and printing, Weems emphasizes the aesthetic similarities of censorship in Portland and the geometric abstractions produced primarily by privileged male artists and thereby considers which forms of expression are
disproportionately sanctioned and controlled in the United States.

The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, is a project by museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in collaboration with

Carrie Mae Weems - The Heart of the Matter
On view at FOMU until 23 August
Info & tickets: fomu.be

Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Painting the Town #4, 2021; from the series Painting the Town; from Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (Aperture, 2025).
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

06/05/2026

“We are all connected by invisible rubber bands: to the people we call our family, the places we come from. The further we stretch those elastic bands, the more we feel them – they cut through our flesh, inhibit blood flow and almost reach breaking point before mercilessly catapulting us back to where we started. 

That’s what life seems to boil down to sometimes: you leave somewhere, you get pulled back. You don’t get away, you have to get away. You believe in the future, you believe in the past. Returning doesn’t seem possible, ever, everything changes, slips away, multiplies, disappears. Nothing remains, nothing ever stands still.”

Especially for the exhibition Families at FOMU, author Niña Weijers has written ten personal texts on the theme of family. In response to the photographs of Jitka Hanzlová, Weijers writes:

“Hanzlová’s photographs from her native village of Rokytník (in former Czechoslovakia) make all these contradictions palpable. She left there at 15, lived in Prague for a while, until she fled the communist regime in the early 1980s and was granted asylum in Germany. After the fall of the Wall, she returned to her native soil for the first time, with a camera in her hand – a lifeline, perhaps; a means to avoid drowning.  

The photographs are neither nostalgic nor ruthless. She presents neither a fantasy of a lost childhood nor a settling of old scores. Her gaze is gentle, not sentimental. The people are real, present. Sometimes they pose, but they are never trapped or distorted by the camera.  

I see Hanzlová’s tornness reflected in the people, the landscape, the colours, the light: she is no longer one of them, but neither is she is an outsider. There is a certain sorrow in that, but also joy. Perhaps this is the meaning of home, and love.”

Families
now on show at FOMU
Info & tickets: fomu.be

Text: Niña Weijers

Image: Jitka Hanzlová, Boy with shield, 1994 from the series Rokytník  1990-1999, Collection FOMU P/1999/35/10 ©️ Jitka Hanzlová

03/05/2026

“I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown.”

For five decades, Carrie Mae Weems (US, 1953) has built an influential and multifaceted oeuvre that draws on personal experiences to address the major social issues of our time. Throughout her work, she explores the construction of power, race, class and gender..

In The Heart of the Matter, Weems assumes a central position as a muse and guide, appearing in many of her series herself. Her body acts as an anchor: a figure moving through time, leading the viewer into spaces shaped by inequality or, at times, unity. Sometimes she averts her gaze, at other moments she looks directly at the viewer. In each instance, she invites reflection on the structures that determine our ways of seeing, remembering and assigning meaning.

Carrie Mae Weems – The Heart of the Matter
Now on show at FOMU
Info & tickets: fomu.be

The Heart of the Matter, curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, is a project by museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, in collaboration with

Image: Carrie Mae Weems, Welcome Home, 1978–84; from the series Family Pictures and Stories; from Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter (Aperture, 2025). ©️ Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

23/04/2026

RIP Suzy Embo
02.04.1936 – 22.04.2026

“Ik heb nooit echt nagedacht over wat ik wilde realiseren. Ik had lef en vloog er gewoon in.”

FOMU is triest het overlijden te vernemen van de in Antwerpen geboren fotografe Suzy Embo. Sinds 1996 heeft FOMU het volledige archief van Suzy Embo in zijn collectie, meer dan 50.000 stuks. Dat leidde in 2017 tot de retrospectieve ‘Suzy Embo. Artiste photographe, photographe d’artistes’, en tot een groot naslagwerk.

Embo’s werk balanceert voortdurend op de grens tussen ‘artiste photographe’ en ‘photographe d’artistes’. Haar vormexperimenten uit de jaren 1950 sluiten aan bij de Subjektive Fotografie van Otto Steinert en leveren haar verschillende expo’s op. In de jaren 1960 verandert haar werk door haar intense contacten met de naoorlogse avant-garde.

Door haar vriendschap met Cobra-kunstenaars zoals Pierre Alechinsky en Christian Dotremont en haar huwelijk met beeldhouwer Reinhoud d’Haese begint ze de kunstscène in beeld te brengen. Dat doet ze aan de hand van informele en intieme portretten, door hun creatieve processen vast te leggen in fotoreeksen en door vernissages, voorstellingen en events te documenteren.

Embo is een roekeloze fotografe. In haar typische filmische stijl fotografeert ze heel vluchtig, met weinig licht. Met haar kleinbeeldcamera maakt ze reeksen van wazige beelden met zware korrel en harde contrasten. Haar zwartwit-foto’s zijn ongekunsteld en spontaan.

Halverwege de jaren 1970 moet ze door een oogziekte noodgedwongen stoppen met professionele fotografie, maar ze publiceerde met Sionna nog een tijdlang een eigen kunsttijdschrift met bijdragen van de meest uiteenlopende kunstenaars.

Beelden:
- Portret Suzy Embo, ca. 1956 © FOMU / Suzy Embo
- Suzy Embo, L’île cassée de Pâques, 1956, P1996/655/28 © FOMU / Suzy Embo
- Suzy Embo, Pierre Alechinsky, jam session, La Bosse, 1969, P/1996/14 © FOMU / Suzy Embo
- Suzy Embo, Le Sacre du printemps (Igor Stravinski, choreografie Maurice Béjart), Opera de Paris, 1965, P/1996/16/34 © FOMU / Suzy Embo

18/03/2026

Who do you consider to be your family? And how do you record your personal history? For the exhibition ‘Families’ we’re diving into the FOMU collection in search of family photos.

Discover historical photo albums as well as photos by contemporary artists with a critical take on the traditional family portrait. These artists and photographers explore the complexity, and sometimes discomfort, of family relationships. They rewrite history with intimate photos, the likes of which you won’t often find in typical photo albums. A dialogue thus emerges between now and the past, between what we cherish and what we dare to question.

With more than 200 photographs from the FOMU collection by, amongst others: Diane Arbus, Cecil Beaton, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lynn Cohen, Bieke Depoorter, Omar Viktor Diop & Lee Shulman, Robert Doisneau, Mayara Ferrão, Sunil Gupta, Peter Hujar, Mous Lamrabat, Bertien van Manen and more.

Families
20.03.2026 - 23.05.2027 at FOMU
Info & tickets: fomu.be
Festive Opening Night on 19.03.2026

08/03/2026

Antoinette Roose: Gender M?
On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we would like to share the story of Antoinette Roose, who originally worked as a seamstress in Ghent. In the 1860s, she decided to enter the emerging field of photography, which was only just beginning to develop commercially. Antoinette Roose was one of the first women to have her own photography studio in Belgium.

As an unmarried woman, she used her maiden name and the initial ‘A’ on the cartes de visite (see slide 2). This use of initials makes it difficult to identify a photographer’s gender. Until 2020, the directory of Belgian photographers classified A. Roose as male. Because most practitioners were male, some women were mistakenly categorised as men. Thanks to recent research at FOMU, about 15 female photographers who had previously been classified as male have been rediscovered.

On her death certificate, Antoinette was described as having no profession. This was later countersigned by her son Charles. Antoinette Roose passed on the trade of photography to both her son and daughter.

Antoinette Roose is considered one of the first independent female photographers in Belgium. Her career shows that women already played an active role in commercial photography in the early days of the medium. At the same time, her story illustrates how women photographers disappeared from history.

Images:
Antoinette Roose, Portrait of a Woman, 1860-1868, Collectie FOMU 2021/21
Antoinette Roose, Albumen print carte de visite, 1860-1868, Collectie FOMU 2021/21

04/03/2026

Een atypische maand in FOMU: achter de schermen bouwen we volop aan maar liefst vier (!) nieuwe tentoonstellingen. Feestelijke openingsavond op 19 maart, kom af! Verder op het programma?

→ Artist Talk met Diana Severin Nguyen (20 maart, tickets beschikbaar) → Mentormentor Portfolio Review (25 maart, volzet)
→ Workshop Smartphonefotografie (28 maart, volzet)
→ Curator Tour in expo Families (29 maart, tickets beschikbaar)

En alvast in april:
→ Beyond the Frame: ChitChat & Print Sale (2 april)

03/03/2026

Soon at FOMU: Tenderly There by Tashattot Collective

Tenderly There shows how artists from the SWANA region (South-West Asia and North Africa) explore, commemorate, and affirm their experiences with q***r intimacy.

The exhibition is curated by .collective , a cultural collective based in Brussels that supports and brings together artists and cultural practitioners from the SWANA region who have been displaced or are currently navigating life in Europe.

The exhibition showcases archival photographs acquired from the next to contemporary works by artists Jeanne et Moreau ( & Randa Mirza .mirza), and . The contrast between archives and the present moment allows for a voyage through time, encapsulating day-to-day activities and intimate moments.

FOMU shares its authority with organisations and collectives through take-overs, interventions and collaborations. The collaboration with Tashattot Collective brings forward perspectives from the SWANA region. Founded in summer 2022, Tashattot has built a growing network of artists and cultural workers in Belgium and abroad. Their efforts to create a strong community are reflected in the cultural programmes they curate, including art exhibitions, film screenings, concerts, lectures, and more.

Tenderly There by Tashattot Collective
20.03.2026 - 10.05.2026 at FOMU
Info & tickets: fomu.be
Festive Opening Night on 19.03.2026

Images:
Kader Attia ‘The Landing Strip’ (2000-2002/2019)
Jeanne et Moreau (Lara Tabet and Randa Mirza) - Image part of the installation Safe Distance, Troubled Dreams (2018)
Mohamad Abdouni, The First Boy I Ever Loved I Know Nothing About Today, 2026
Kader Attia ‘The Landing Strip’ (2000-2002/2019)

Adres

Waalsekaai 47
Antwerp
2000

Openingstijden

Dinsdag	10:00 - 18:00
Woensdag	10:00 - 18:00
Donderdag	10:00 - 18:00
Vrijdag	10:00 - 18:00
Zaterdag	10:00 - 18:00
Zondag	10:00 - 18:00

Telefoon

+3232429300

Website

http://www.fomu.be/

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