In Antwerp, families come in all shapes and sizes

In Mous Lamrabat’s Moms see everything (2019/2021), the photographer pictures his mother wearing a pair of novelty glasses. The frames, which resemble hands with long slim fingers and bright red nails, cradle her face, underscoring a gaze that is directed gently away from the camera. Physically not much larger than a postcard, the portrait is situated up high on a wall in one FOMU’s four galleries, where new show ‘Families’ is open. Its towering perspective mirrors the work’s moniker: this matriarchal figure, seemingly, is keeping watch. She’s joined, at a slightly lower level, by Esther ‘Etty’ Beaton, photographed in black and white by her son Cecil, nearly 100 years earlier in 1927.

‘There's so much to say about family,’ offers curator Anne Ruygt, reflecting on the genesis of the Antwerp show in the photography museum’s sun-filled café. ‘It’s unavoidable. Always, but especially nowadays when there are so many societal discussions about the theme of family: about motherhood – and allowing for other experiences of motherhood – about abortion and gender equality, but also the nuclear family and its origins as a historical construct, and how people now are looking for other ways to live together.’

‘We wanted to talk about these other forms [of living together],’ she continues, ‘but also question the way we look at each other and how our society is structured, versus how we picture ourselves and our families.’ The show functions then as a kind of visual investigation of the many interpretations of family, examining how photographers, professional and amateur, have negotiated these relationships both in their work and in private albums, employing their viewpoint on what is fundamentally a universal topic. Chiefly, ‘Families’ asks us to consider who we call family and how we record our personal history, oftentimes centring the friends, caregivers and wider community that have reshaped tradition.

With Being There, Omar Victor Diop expands this concept of the familial even further. Working with Lee Shulman of The Anonymous Project, the Senegalese self-portrait artist inserts his image into a series of anonymous slides of white Americans from the 50s and 60s, a device that disrupts the homogeny of the pictures and asks the viewer to question the society that informed them. Mayara Ferrão’s Álbum de desesquecimento meanwhile, which opens the show, similarly explores absences in photography, and also navigates the racial bias of modern tech systems. Using AI, the Brazilian artist imagines intimate moments and tender celebrations amongst queer Black and Indigenous women in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man additionally, maybe anomalously, features, while elsewhere there are copies of Carmen Winant’s My Birth – the artist’s 2018 book depicting the physicality of labour and delivery – lying open in a vitrine, nearby to a series of anonymous baby photos. Early examples of studio photography (they were made in the 19^th and 20^th centuries), in the background of each baby photo is an arm – or sometimes half a body – belonging to a mother holding up an infant who’s not yet able to sit independently. Described by FOMU as ‘hidden mother portraits’, the pictures illustrate invisible labour and inspire subsequent questions about family dynamics. From the same era, post-mortem portraits speak to the way previous generations have commemorated their dead, while two further vitrines are filled with photobooks by Seiichi Furuya, each spread a memorial for the photographer’s late wife.

As Ruygt acknowledges, ‘Families’ is not exhaustive, its scope contained, partially at least, by the show’s design as a vehicle for the FOMU collection. Made up of some four million objects, since 2023 the museum has invited an artist each year to construct their own reimagining of the collection’s contents; for this latest edition, comprised of more than 200 photographs, Ruygt approached the Dutch author Niña Weijers (she previously contributed a foreword for Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs, written while Akerman was caring for her dying mother in 2013). ‘The show really needed writing and a personal tone of voice,’ says the curator. ‘We have so many beautiful, mysterious images, we felt the need to invite someone with the right sensitivity, to really reflect on them.’

Weijers has written about ten works that appear in the show, using the texts to reflect on her parents’ divorce, her son's relationship with her friends’ kids, and her early understanding of her younger brother’s arrival. In relation to Ugo Woatzi’s The Age of Love, a new series about different forms of coexistence, she delves into the limitations of established family structures, and the potential for new forms of togetherness to be moulded by domestic fallouts. ‘The older I get, the more I consider my friends to be my self-chosen family, and an alternative to the nuclear family that I never found appealing,’ she writes. ‘Kinship is so much more than shared blood, and bearing this knowledge feels not just celebratory but revolutionary.’

The Age of Love, which Woatzi produced to be viewed in the museum’s Kaiserpanorama – a large circular wooden cabinet from 1905, designed for 25 people to sit around and view individual pictures – revisits the archetypal family portrait through the lens of chosen family, leaning into the tools of classic portraiture but with a firm root in contemporary aesthetics. A by-product of working with the structure, which wears a green velvet skirt and an impressive sense of magnitude, is the implied invitation to gather and be with other people; a fitting impulse for a group of photographs that leans celebratory, and ultimately riffs on the wider show’s core themes.

‘My goal was to tie in contemporary questions with historical phenomenon,’ notes Ruygt. ‘To bring those two worlds together. And I think Ugo did that beautifully.’

'Families’ at FOMU, Antwerp until 23 May 2026