Dagmar van Weeghel

Dagmar van Weeghel (b. Netherlands, 1974), works at the intersection of photography and the archive, where images become vessels of memory, silence, and repetition. Moving between past and present, she traces the historical frameworks that have shaped the long and entangled relationship between Africa and Europe, revealing how these structures continue to echo within contemporary life.

Grounded in a background in Film and Photography from the University of the Arts Amsterdam, her work is informed by lived experiences in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and South Africa. These geographies shape her sensitivity to African and diasporic narratives, situating her practice within questions of belonging, displacement, and inherited histories.

Through research-led processes, she engages with archival photographs, documents, and image-making as acts of re-reading. By reactivating fragments of the archive, her work challenges dominant historical narratives and uses storytelling to expose how colonial legacies persist within visual memory, shaping the present as much as the past.

In Diaspora, Dagmar van Weeghel considers how identity and belonging are shaped by histories of representation. Each portrait centers an individual and is accompanied by their personal narrative, placing lived experience alongside the image. Referencing historical portraiture and Orientalist imagery, Van Weeghel engages with visual traditions shaped by the colonial gaze and the process of ‘othering’. For each person portrayed, antique and contemporary textiles, jewellery, religious and culturally charged objects are cut apart and reassembled into new garments and adornments. The portraits evoke something familiar yet resist belonging to any single cultural tradition. This process of fragmentation and reassembly echoes diaspora itself: histories, places and identities carried across time and geography and brought into new relationships.

What do we think we recognize in these images - and how much of what we see is shaped by what we already know?