Portrait Archives

Portrait Archives articulates portraiture not as a genre of representation, but as an institutional and symbolic dispositif. Across different contexts, the portrait functions as an effigy: a site in which individual presence is translated into collective memory, ethical positioning, and cultural responsibility. The archive brings together cycles of works developed within exhibition frameworks, institutional commissions, and ongoing research projects, establishing continuity between artistic practice and public engagement.

Curatorial Cycles within the Portrait Archives

Artists as Public Figures — United Nations, New York (2015)

This cycle comprises sixteen portraits of artists realized in the context of the exhibition The Transformative Power of Art at the United Nations Headquarters, New York. Produced within an institutional and diplomatic framework, these effigies suspend personal likeness in favor of symbolic visibility. The figure of the artist is positioned as a bearer of cultural agency, ethical responsibility, and civic presence within a global public sphere.

Modern Artists — A Bruit Secret / Pandora’s Box

Ten portraits of modern artists developed in relation to the exhibitions A Bruit Secret and Pandora’s Box. In this curatorial framework, the portrait becomes a site of transmission and concealment, negotiating between revelation and secrecy, genealogy and discontinuity. The artist’s image operates less as documentation and more as a symbolic threshold through which cultural memory is activated.

Portraits in Cameroon — Installation Context

Two portraits produced within an installation framework in Cameroon, where the image enters a postcolonial institutional space. Here, portraiture engages directly with questions of visibility, representation, and the politics of public memory, situating the effigy within a broader negotiation between local context and transnational symbolic structures.

Ongoing Research Projects

Axial Age Portraits (in development)

This ongoing project draws its conceptual framework from the notion of the “Axial Age,” investigating figures who have contributed to foundational ethical, spiritual, and philosophical transformations across cultures. The portraits are conceived as symbolic condensations of historical agency, exploring how ethical paradigms emerge and circulate through embodied figures.

Different Faces of Peace (in development)

Different Faces of Peace approaches portraiture as a field for rearticulating the concept of peace from multiple perspectives. The project brings together figures who have actively engaged in peace-building processes across political, cultural, and social domains. Rather than proposing a unified iconography of peace, the cycle articulates peace as a plural, contested, and historically situated practice, refracted through diverse individual trajectories.