MEP Studio presents the first solo exhibition by Ghanaian-Dutch artist Joel Quayson, winner of the 2025 Dior Prize for Photography and Visual Arts for Young Talents. Working primarily with photography and video, he examines the multiple layers of his identity: culture, religion, gender and sexual orientation, as well as how they interweave and sometimes clash.
The exhibition brings together two videos, each conceived as an intimate selfportrait. In How do you feel? (2024), facing the camera as if before a mirror, Joel Quayson timidly changes clothes – from sober attire into party wear – while a voice relentlessly repeats the same question: “How do you feel?” In this stripped-down and poignant video, the artist courageously reveals his vulnerability. Shaped both by a Christian upbringing and his queer identity, he exposes the permanent tension between self-expression and cultural and familial expectations. The second video, Dance like no one is watching (2025), is a montage of sequences showing the artist dancing in an empty room. Continuing his identity exploration through performance, the work expresses the liberating power of solitary dance, paradoxically filmed to be offered to the public gaze. Responding to each other, these two works articulate restraint, emancipation and the desire for self-affirmation.
This introspective work, delicate and sincere, where vulnerability, pride and strength are expressed, speaks to a universal experience amplified in the digital age: the conflict between the impulse toward authenticity and the fear of judgment. What do we choose to show others? What do we keep to ourselves? And ultimately, how do we feel?
Born in 1997 in The Hague, Joel Quayson is a Dutch visual artist and photographer of Ghanaian descent. A graduate in photography from the Grafisch Lyceum in Rotterdam, he is currently continuing his studies at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
Joel Quayson — How do you feel?
February 11 – April 5, 2026
MEP Studio
5/7 Rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris, France
https://www.mep-fr.org/
