Mallory Lowe Mpoka
in Paspébiac
EXHIBITION
Vessels for the Archipelagic Memory
Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Montreal, Québec | lowemallory.com
Vessels for the Archipelagic Memory is a photographic series that assembles reactivated images into a fragmented field where body, land and built space converge. Red earth, water and porous architectures, thresholds and in-betweens, form a shared visual language, situating the body within landscapes shaped by care where touch, immersion and gesture become modes of inscription.
Drawn from an existing archive built through travels between Montreal and Cameroon from 2020 to 2024, the photographs are displaced and recomposed, allowing new correspondences to surface between intimacy and environment, presence and absence. The quarry, the home and the body echo one another as sites that hold, mark and transform memory.
The work approaches the image as a living surface, one that absorbs, carries and reconfigures experience, proposing identity as something continuously negotiated through contact, across time, space and material traces.
EXHIBITION AT RENCONTRES
Vessels for the Archipelagic Memory
Mallory Lowe Mpoka (born 1996 in Montréal, where she lives and works) is a Belgian-Cameroonian artist whose work explores the connections between identity, memory and place. Her multidisciplinary practice, including photography, weaving, sculpture, dyeing and installation, reactivates family archives and memorabilia within a nomadic state of “in-betweenness.”
Mpoka’s work has been presented internationally, notably at Villa Romana (Italy), the National Gallery of Canada, and SAVVY Contemporary (Germany). She published her artist’s book Architecture of the Self: What Lives Within Us in winter 2024. Her forthcoming major body of work will be presented in summer 2026 at Les Rencontres d’Arles.