Mounir Eddib presents Taliswoman

28.09.2025-14.12.2025

24 September 2025

In Taliswoman, artist Mounir Eddib invites us to descend into a layered landscape of memory and myth. The exhibition reimagines the coal mines of Genk not as a closed Industrial chapter, but as haunted sites filled with stories from the past that have yet to be told.

As the grandson of a miner who arrived in Belgium in the 1970s as a so-called “guest worker,” and born to Moroccan parents from the Western Saharan borderlands, Eddib’s art is deeply connected to histories of migration and labor that continue to shape the region. While official accounts of the mines have often foregrounded economic development, Eddib looks elsewhere—to the unseen, the mystical, the intimate.

Aboveground

The exhibition begins “aboveground,” in a bright room shaped by community,everyday rituals, and local landscapes. Through depictions of mundane activities and places, Eddib honors interconnection as a mode of resilience. Here, we find decorated feminine garments such as the indigo-rich melhfa, a traditional Sahrawi textile that, when worn, dyes the skin blue. In another merging of body and material,the monumental painting Birch Spirit (2024) intertwines a human form with a birch tree on a former mining site. What makes one feel rooted? Is it family, a job, a specific landscape, a shared history?

Underground

As we move into the second gallery, “underground,” the tone shifts. Entering the darkened space, visitors are enveloped in shadows and the thick smell of tar. Ancestors and spirits of the land flicker in and out of view. In this realm, the mine is no longer just an industrial site but a portal: haunted and hallowed. In the mixed-media painting He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother (2025), a group of miners has traveled down a narrow shaft that simultaneously evokes the interior of their tarnished lungs.

Materials

Throughout the exhibition, Eddib brings together materials with contrasting significance: North African magical substances such as medicinal tar and lead, alongside byproducts retrieved from Genk’s mine waste hills. Lead and tin—ores drawn from deep inside the earth’s crust—take on various applications: melted into figurative silhouettes, welded together into chunky frames. There is a shrine-like power to the works, adorned with metallic glimmers and smothered with tar and pigments.

Taliswoman

Inspired by his mother, Eddib sheds light on the underrecognized role of women in Genk’s mining legacy. Taliswoman highlights the strength and significance of feminized spaces and practices, such as protective folk rituals carried out at home by women from ethnic and Muslim minorities. However, Eddib resists the production of mere depictions or biographical documents. Much like the fragmentation experienced through migration, we navigate Eddib’s works by looking at absence as much as presence—by what is lost, and what remains.

Fertile ground

Mining the earth is a form of looking back. To dig is to return the past to the present, both physically and emotionally. “Rooting” also implies a movement into the earth, but it is equally a future-oriented action. A landscape—both scarred and sacred—is fertile ground for old stories to resurface,and for new narratives to take root.

Curator: Kevin Gallagher

In collaboration with Kunstplaats Vonk

Bio

Mounir Eddib (° 1995) is a Moroccan-Belgian painter and mixed media artist raised in Oud-Winterslag (Genk, Belgium), a working-class neighborhood known for its nearby decommissioned coal mines. As the grandson of a miner and the son of Amazigh parents from the Western Saharan borderlands, his autobiographical art is inspired by issues of belonging, the rawness of industrial landscapes and North African mythology. Eddib draws on Amazigh, Sahrawi, and Islamic folk rituals and magical practices to imbue his art with amulet-like properties, and to re-imagine the forgotten histories of former mining sites.