Montreal artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka showcases four works at Arles photography festival's Discovery Prize exhibition
The 30-year-old Mile End photographer launches her second book and competes for a Madame Figaro award at Europe's largest annual photo event.
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Montreal photographer Mallory Lowe Mpoka is marking her 30th birthday with a major European debut: four of her works appear in the Discovery Prize exhibition at the Rencontres d'Arles, the annual photography festival opening July 6 in southern France. She is also nominated for the Madame Figaro Arles Photo Prize and will launch her second photobook during the two-week event.
The Rencontres d'Arles, drawing nearly 400 artists across 28 venues and a half-century of editions, transforms the 50,000-person UNESCO-listed town into the world's photography capital. Lowe Mpoka, a Concordia graduate still early in her career—"five or six years of practice," by her reckoning—stands among 50 exhibiting artists at a moment of momentum. Her 2024 photobook Architecture of the Self won attention, and she showed at the 2025 Momenta Biennale.
Her practice transcends photography. She weaves, embroiders, works with beads and ceramics, merging textiles and analog film. "I'm not trying to challenge the photographic medium, but to reimagine it—to rethink photography in a context that reflects my cultural heritage," she said. Her Belgian and Cameroonian roots inform every project.
Visiting her Mile End studio three weeks before departure, Lowe Mpoka radiated excitement. Her four works—already in Europe—were displayed on red-earth-colored walls, a terracotta pigment native to Cameroonian soil and deliberately chosen for her book's cover. The color carries symbolic weight for her.
Curator Nadine Hounkpatin selected seven artists for the Discovery show from roughly 500 submissions, exploring how photography claims truth while revealing subjective reality. Lowe Mpoka's new diptych, Procession I and Procession II, renders visible "the silences of the ferocious war waged by France's colonial forces against Cameroonian independence fighters," according to Hounkpatin's statement. The works sit between family memory and postcolonial imagination.
