Luna Mahoux

The Kunsthaus Glarus is pleased to present If you don’t make it louder they won’t hear us, the first major institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland by Luna Mahoux.

In her artistic practice, Luna Mahoux explores forms and spaces of community and collectivity in Black popular and vernacular culture, bringing them into

discussion through photographs, videos, and texts. Her work is informed by a deep interest in the history of Black music, particularly the US-American underground rap scene and the visual culture surrounding it. From a personal and intimate point of view, she scours the vast archive of images held by the internet, bringing to the fore images that capture the rhymes, gestures, and stories of Black artists, musicians, and common people. These forms of circulation are instrumental in creating a connected global community that narrates its own history. 

Luna Mahoux’s images are neither simply found nor simply made. They are selected, extracted, cropped, enlarged, layered, and repositioned. Her gesture of making a screenshot thus becomes a form of looking itself: a way of interrupting the continuous flow of visual information to isolate a particular moment. A reframing of these found images as forms of remembering, but also as sites of potentiality, as a capacity to claim space and to be heard.

In her artistic work, she is as interested in the potential of low-resolution images and questions of artistic value as she is in exploring composition and color (she studied painting at first). These concerns are also evident in the multilayered installation for her exhibition at Kunsthaus Glarus. A film still from the seminal series The Wire (2002–08) is blown up to a monumental scale, filling the large wall at the end of the exhibition space. Drowned in blue hues, abstract and beautiful at first sight, the image depicts an American police officer arresting a 14-year-old boy. The still exceeds its original narrative function, raising questions about how representations of violence enter collective memory and how their meaning shifts between popular culture, personal experience, and the exhibition space.

The publication presented in front of the large photograph is spread across stacks of paper (No Time To Die, 2026). It operates less as a conventional catalogue than as a fragmented visual and textual constellation. The artist creates an intimate diary of thoughts and memories drawn from her lived experiences, through written notes as well as a compilation of vernacular and popular images from her archive–moments of joy, beauty, intimacy, and grief. Refusing a singular, linear narrative, Luna Mahoux allows gaps, loops, and ruptures to take up space, allowing fragments to speak for themselves. Meaning emerges through proximity: between an image and a sentence, between one fragment and another, between what is remembered, what is known, and what has been inherited. 

The artist’s practice of collecting is also always a practice of collaboration: she seeks out the people behind the stories she follows and engages in exchange with them, working together to find an appropriate form through which to bear witness. In 2021, she spent several months in Chicago engaging with the drill rap scene; in 2024, Luna Mahoux travelled to Memphis. There, she made her first documentary film, the short film The Other Queen of Memphis (2025), which pays tribute to the Black female rapper La Chat. It was also there that the artist took one of her rare photographs herself: the image of the T-shirt bearing the words “No Time To Die,” which lingers high above our heads in the exhibition space. The photograph also serves as the cover of the publication below, which will be published in print later this year.

The artist’s method of folding meaning and images into each other to create new narratives gives rise to spatial setups that can circulate online, while placing emphasis on the physical encounter with the work and the experience of looking attentively, together in the space. For the opening, Luna Mahoux invited the experimental musician TM from New York City to perform within her installation – yet another collaboration that will reverberate beyond the exhibition space. Luna Mahoux makes visible experiences that are rarely included in official narratives and histories, and that are even more readily excluded in the current political climate, which seeks to rewrite Black history – also through the control of technological devices that reconfigure what we once understood the internet’s potential as a community-building space to be. All the more important, then, is the insistence that these images and stories remain radically present.

Luna Mahoux (*1997, lives and works in Brussels) is graduate of La Cambre, Brussels in painting, she joined Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing in 2023, where she further develops her practice of moving images. Her first documentary, The Other Queen of Memphis (2024), was selected in competition at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her work and films have been widely exhibited and presented internationally, including at Cordova, Barcelona; good or trash, Paris; Kunstverein Hamburg; Salon de Montrouge, Paris; Mécène du Sud, Montpellier; KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels; Basel Social Club, Basel; Cherish, Geneva; Coalmine, Winterthur; Photo Elysée, Lausanne; Triangle Astéride, Marseille; The Metrograph with Montez Press Radio, New York City; Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris; Arsenic, Lausanne. In 2023, she received the tiff – Emerging Belgian Photography Prize awarded by FOMU, Antwerp, followed by the Fintro Prize, Brussels in 2024. In 2027/28, she will be resident of La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz.