For the first time in Belgium : After the Château d’eau in Toulouse, Pieter Hugo’s exhibition « On Reality and Other Stories » is being displayed at the Forest Cultural Center in Brussels through November 26.
Pieter Hugo was born in Johannesburg in 1976. His work has been honored several times, in Arles for the Rencontres Photographiques in 2008 (Discovery Prize) and in 2009 where he was featured at the Rencontres in Bamako, Mali.
« On Reality and Other Stories » features several different groups of work including Albinism, The Hyena Men, and Nollywood. This young photographer, from the post-apartheid generation, has what can be considered an ethnological look on South African society and other cultures on the African continent. He hunts out visually interesting subjects, including albinos, dog masters, and more recently personalities of the Nigerian movie industry.
His photos provoke curiosity, and are visually intriguing for their frontal approach, his subjects posing proudly like this man from the series Nollywood, Gabazzini Zuo. Enugu, (Nigeria, 2008) dressed in black, brandishing flesh taken from the cow dying at his feet.
Pieter Hugo’s pictures are not ornamental, rather they provide witness to the cultures he has discovered and wants to transmit. Although he claims to tell stories, his are not pictures that can be qualified as narrative. He explores his subjects, as a group. He doesn’t follow them, he records them. On his website, www.pieterhugo.com, he describes the origins of his story about The Hyena Men: “The idea came when a friend of mine sent me a picture taken from his car, with a cell phone…”
Pieter Hugo, « On reality and other stories »
Sophie Hedtmann
Jusqu’au 26 novembre
Forest Centre Culturel
BRASS 364, avenue Van Volxem – 1190 Bruxelles
