The Nuclear Family
‘The Nuclear Family’ is a photo series exploring the complex dynamics of a family’s life. The photographs explore the ideal “image” of the family that my parents tried to pursue despite their divorce. When I discovered that my parents did not have a family photo album, the social construct of a nuclear family quickly became dominant in my life. Together with actors, I dive back into my childhood in staged photographs in search of my parents’ lost utopia. My memories and stories become a playground to create my own family album.
The family photo is not just a passive recording of intimate moments, but also a performative and ideological collection in which visual and non-visual codes, norms and desires are played out. The album maintains an ideal image of a family, reinforcing dominant visions of identity, class, gender and race, while others fade into the background.
The family album thus becomes a balance between truth and construction, and between memory and imagination. In this sense, the family album is universal, or in other words, every family album is the same. In The Nuclear Family, I work around this idea of a universal family album by approaching it as a constructed narrative, using my own memories as a foothold.
Don’ t Trust Pretty Girls
Installation Fondation A, 2025
The Dailies
Reading the Newspaper
In ‘Don’t Trust Pretty Girls’, Kayin Luys explores his relationship with his family in-law. He staged situations based on stories and memories the family confided in him. Using both existing and invented narratives, a play of possibilities opens a new space to the viewer. Tension between the real, fantasy and the unknown, leaves room to question what you see. Confronting his audience with a ‘family’, he hopes to let them wonder about what kind of roles we play and fulfil in our surroundings.
The title ‘Don’t Trust Pretty Girls’ refers to the tattoo on the grandfather’s left arm. It starts a process of subjective interpretation. Luys is convinced that, even though the viewer looks at the photographs with their personal baggage, the perceptions of depicted narratives are heavily influenced by conventions of popular media and the structure of society. As there is no way to escape these conventions, he decided to actively use them by setting up a highly controlled, personal dramaturgy.
Personal note: after 11 wonderfull years, my relationship with Nata ended. Nata, the family and I still want to continue the project, but are still figuring out how.
My series often start by observing my surroundings, to which I make interventions with actors. Daily events, memories and anecdotes find a new life in a photographic space overruled with different conventions. Images are drawn out and later staged into an image. It is an ever-evolving body of photos based on real life events. It is a daily practice, with images later finding a new place in other series.
Installation Mussée de la Photographie Charleroi 2023