MA Festival 2025 works with artist Joëlle Dubois

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.