An arrangement of nearly one hundred portraits (across all media, periods and sizes) within an installation designed and curated by Tanguy Poujol.

In November 2025, a wide-ranging international call was launched via social media to collect all kinds of portraits with a view to presenting a diverse selection within a unique exhibition design. Portraits of diverse figures (human or non-human); created using various techniques (photography, but also painting, drawing, engraving, textiles, video, sculptural objects, etc.); drawn from series or as one-off pieces; in small, medium or large formats; ranging from self-portraits to group portraits; from the past and the present; … we kept the call for entries very open in order to highlight the diversity of our presence in the world. Photography as a mirror of the world and its inhabitants is taken here quite literally.

We received over 850 responses, with a total of almost 2,000 images submitted by both amateur and professional artists. We have retained around sixty of these, following a multi-stage selection process involving progressive elimination, thanks to the successive choices made by an expanded team of nine people, ensuring diversity in the approach to the images whilst remaining attentive to the quality of the presence of the figure depicted and, for the most part, to the frontal, mirror-like gaze of the model or subject of the image. To this initial selection are added works by guest artists. We have also supplemented the final selection with a series of works from the collections of the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, the collections of the Province of Liège and the Province of Liège Foundation for Art and Culture.

Curated by Tanguy Poujol (France, 1990) and conceived as a proposal that is both experimental and original in its fragmented and disparate form – whilst remaining highly accessible in terms of its subject matter (the portrait being one of the most straightforward and direct artistic genres) – this arrangement of portraits is a literal echo of, and an attempt to test, the phrase that concludes the BIP’s artist’s statement:  “What if everything held together when we accept that nothing goes together?”

Tanguy Poujol is a Paris-based artist whose practice encompasses installation, writing, film and the visual arts, constantly blurring the boundaries between them. Dialogue and conversation are integral to his creative process, which, through constant interaction with the animate and inanimate environments around him, yields results that take on novel forms. For BIP2026, he reuses elements from the former library to create a structure that simultaneously evokes the weight of the institution and the emancipation made possible by knowledge and collective memory. The portraits will be incorporated into this structure.