For one year, the Frac Réunion collection will be on display in the spaces of the University Library of Law and Letters on the Moufia campus of the University of Réunion. The exhibition Nous, les portraits is a further step in this dialogue initiated in 2021 between the two institutions, designed to question the way in which images look at us as much as we look at them.

This exhibition brings together the works of Farah Al Qasimi, Samuel Fosso, Pieter Hugo, Alice Mann, Mary Sibande & Gabrielle Manglou.
FROM AUGUST 28, 2025 TO JULY 03, 2026 BU LAW-LETTERS – MOUFIA CAMPUS
Monday to Friday, 07:30 a.m. to 19:00 p.m.; Saturday, 08:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

The portrait is never one. It is always a matter of relationship, construction, power, and strategies of resistance. It begins where two presences intersect—the viewer and the viewed—but it summons more: image regimes, collective mythologies, deviations from reality, future fictions. It is a genre that constantly reinvents itself because it touches on what is most fragile and political in us: the image of oneself in the eyes of others, and vice versa.

The portrait constantly brings us back to this movement of exchange, of sliding between assigned places. I am the one who looks, the one who is looked at, the one who frames, the one who poses. And the other, in turn, can be the one who stares at me, who precedes me, who imagines me, or who reveals me. There is no stable position in the image. The portrait always shifts the boundaries between I and you, between subject and object, between assumed fiction and projected truth.

In Pieter Hugo's photographs from the series There's a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends, portraiture becomes a site of visible tension. The faces of Lebo Tlali and Jake Aikman, close and silent, are the subject of a radical operation: by manipulating color channels, Hugo neutralizes skin tone to better reveal its variations, the marks of the sun, the layers of melanin. This work reverses racial ideology based on skin color. Where photography has long been used to classify bodies, to construct racist typologies, Pieter Hugo uses it as a tool for reverse revelation. He shows that skin is never black or white, but always mixed, marked, altered—and that the gaze is never neutral. These images don't simply document faces: they document how we look at them. This disorder of the gaze runs throughout the exhibition. Sometimes, the portrait turns against the photographer.

In Alice Mann's Chloé Heydenrych, Paige Titus, Ashnique Paulse, Elizabeth Jordan, and Chloéde Kock, five young South African drum majorettes stare at us from a low-angle perspective. The lens is clearly dominated. This framing choice reverses the asymmetry of the traditional portrait: the image becomes a territory of power, sisterhood, and assumed visibility.
And sometimes, the portrait emerges where it seems to have disappeared. Farah Al Qasimi's After Dinner shows an interior saturated with textures, patterns, and colors. Two bodies are in the frame, but no faces. And yet, the image overflows with presence: the postures, the accessories, the atmospheres construct a portrait without a face, but not without an identity. The artist undoes the expectations of the genre to better reveal what it contains of imagination and control.

Mary Sibande, for her part, slips into her own portrait by proxy. With I'm a Lady, she summons a sculptural alter ego, Sophie, somewhere between servant and empress, colonial memory and visual reinvention. Through this theatricalized figure, the artist performs a fictional self-portrait, where the claim to another role is conveyed through costume, posture, and symbol. Through this double, she does not represent herself: she replays herself. The portrait becomes a strategic construction, where identity is performed at a distance, between endured memory and chosen role.

Another game is at work with the roles and archetypes at the heart of Samuel Fosso's Tati series. The pirate, the lifeguard, the businessman: so many stereotypical figures that the artist embodies in a critical and jubilant gesture. The visual satire is scathing, the humor becomes a political tool. The portraits are joyful and colorful, evoking a subversive masquerade, where the artist declines the figures imposed by society. Behind this apparent lightness emerges a highly critical work: Fosso questions the way in which
identities are manufactured, sold, consumed.

Finally, Gabrielle Manglou summons another ghost of the photographic portrait: that of the colonial archive. Starting with an old family photo, she augments the image by inserting other figures, colorful patterns, and offbeat gestures. Flying in the feathers becomes a counter-portrait, a gesture of symbolic reparation in the face of the iconographic impoverishment of colonized peoples. Behind the frozen photo, she brings to light a multiplicity of stories and invisible presences.

In these works, the portrait is never a simple representation. It is trouble, a play, a reappropriation, a critical fiction, a place of memory. It is not a mirror, but a prism—a space where identities shift, replay, and are staged. Together, these portraits form a composite “we,” a “we” that escapes assignments, that inhabits the image without being confined within it. We, the portraits, is to say that each face is a world, a space, a factory of otherness.

Anna Vrinat