MA Festival 2025 works with artist Joëlle Dubois

3 MA Festival25 Vertical Post

MA Festival will once again look stun­ning dur­ing the upcom­ing edi­tion as we are work­ing with artist Joëlle Dubois for the com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Behold the beau­ti­ful poster as a pre­view of the brochure.

Joëlle Dubois (b. 1990, Ghent) is best known for her colour­ful, acces­si­ble paint­ings that strik­ing­ly cap­ture the com­plex­i­ty of the mod­ern indi­vid­ual in an increas­ing­ly indi­vid­u­al­is­tic soci­ety. Her work explores themes such as gen­der, fem­i­nin­i­ty, sex­u­al­i­ty, diver­si­ty, and fetishism. According to Philippe Van Cauteren (S.M.A.K.), she paints the arche­types of our time: social media, lone­li­ness, iden­ti­ty, body sham­ing, and more. In her recent solo exhi­bi­tion at Keteleer Gallery, Dubois pre­sent­ed a pow­er­ful series of works cen­tred around loss, grief, mem­o­ry, con­tem­pla­tion, and love. Once again, she draws deeply from her per­son­al expe­ri­ences, where sad­ness, uncer­tain­ty, and a long­ing for phys­i­cal­i­ty and tan­gi­bil­i­ty are pal­pa­ble. At the same time, she weaves humour into her work, under­scor­ing the absur­di­ty of tragedy and mak­ing stress more bear­able. In her new works, Dubois visu­alis­es the emo­tions asso­ci­at­ed with the loss of her moth­er, who suf­fered from Alzheimer’s dis­ease, and the grief that is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to it. The theme of the fad­ing and even­tu­al dis­ap­pear­ance of self­hood and iden­ti­ty runs as a red thread through these works.

Her recent works mark a new direc­tion in her oeu­vre, in which not only her per­son­al sto­ry takes cen­tre stage, but a shift in her artis­tic style is also evi­dent. The divid­ing line between safe­ty and dan­ger, between calami­ty and calm, increas­ing­ly blurs, to the point where we for­get when we should laugh or cry. Joëlle Dubois gives form to these con­fused feel­ings through a more mono­chro­mat­ic colour palette, a restrained visu­al lan­guage, and sim­ple com­po­si­tions, cre­at­ing a sen­sa­tion of open­ness and space, in which emo­tion is cen­tral. The inti­ma­cy of these images is strik­ing; each piece is a frag­ment of her­self, pre­sent­ed to the view­er in an almost voyeuris­tic manner.

https://​www​.joelle​dubois​.com/