A commission from the French National Center for Visual Arts (CNAP), developed in dialogue with Hangar's open call for projects and supported by the French Embassy in Brussels.

Constance Nouvel, lives and works in Paris (France)

Constance Nouvel (France, 1985) is graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2010. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles in 2017. In 2019-2020, she received support from the Fondation des Artistes and the Île-de-France Region for a cycle of three exhibitions. This tripartite project resulted in the publication of DIAPORAMA, released in the same year by Le Point du Jour. In 2022, she presented her work at the Festival du Jeu de Paume. The following year, it was shown at Paris Photo and at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Recently awarded the LE BAL / ADAGP Prize for Young Creation 2027, Constance Nouvel will exhibit her work at LE BAL (Paris, France) in 2027. Alongside her artistic practice, she teaches photography at the École Supérieure d?Art de Lorraine (Metz) and regularly intervenes at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Versailles.

Reinventing Photography was born from a singular moment: a moment in which photography, on the occasion of the bicentenary of its invention, turns its gaze upon itself once again, questions its own history, and opens new possibilities. By bringing together the fifteen projects commissioned by the Cnap and the five winners of Hangar?s open call, Reinventing Photography forms a remarkably rich body of work. The artistic approaches are as diverse as the backgrounds, stories, and sensibilities that shape them. The exhibition does not claim to encompass all the themes that contemporary photography can address today; rather, it offers a journey?through time, through forms, and through ways of seeing, thinking, and making images. Through these twenty projects, the exhibition proposes not so much an exhaustive survey as a sensitive snapshot of contemporary photography: its concerns, its languages, its tensions, and its possible futures. Beyond national borders, and without seeking to define or oppose a Belgian scene and a French scene, Reinventing Photography brings together artists who are deeply committed both to their practice and to their exploration of the photographic medium.

Each inhabits photography with rigour, freedom, and humility. All seem driven by a shared pursuit: to honour its essence while pushing its boundaries, opening it to new uses, new gestures, and new narratives, without ever diminishing its power or singularity. To speak of the bicentenary of the invention of photography is inevitably to reflect on the time in which we stand. Is it the time of history? The time of creation? The time of the institutions that support artists? Perhaps it is, above all, the time that belongs to art itself: a time that escapes calendars, yet leaves its mark.

Delphine Dumont
Director of Hangar

Hangar
18 Place du Châtelain
1050 Brussels, Belgium

More info here