Emma Damba
Master of visual arts
KASK School of Arts Ghent
Specialisms: Photography / Photomontage / Fine Art
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Emma Damba
First Name: Emma
Last Name: Damba
Specialisms: Photography / Photomontage / Fine Art
Sectors:
My Location: Brussels, Belgium
University / College: KASK School of Arts Ghent
Course / Program Title: Master of visual arts
About
Emma is a French multidisciplinary visual artist based between Belgium and France. She studied at La Cambre, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 2025. She then went to Kask School of Arts to earn her master’s degree in photography in 2026.
Her work has been featured in group exhibitions as part of her studies, notably in April 2026 in the exhibition “Nothing is more difficult than knowing precisely what we see” at the Zwarte Zaal.
My work lies at the intersection of photography, collage, and video. These are the mediums that best allow me to express myself through my art. The focus of my projects has always been on the question of identity and society’s relationship with Black people. I explore power dynamics and, above all, society’s perception of Black people. When it comes to identity, I’m particularly interested in the children of immigrants, because they have a completely different relationship with their country of origin. It’s this ambiguity that interests me and drives me to explore it, because I myself am a “victim” of it.
BOSUBA is a photography project born of a deep desire: to reconnect with my homeland, Senegal, and to reclaim my place in a family history from which I had long been estranged. This work emerged as an act of healing, reclaiming, and reinvention. The first stage of the project involved exploring the family archives. I collected old photographs, often taken before I was born, in which I did not yet exist within the frame. Through collage, inlay, and superposition, I created new images in which I physically integrate myself into these past scenes. These interventions do not seek to erase history, but to inhabit it differently: they open up gaps, possibilities, and parallel narratives where my presence becomes a bridge between what was and what could have been. In a second phase, I went to Senegal to experience the territory for myself. I photographed the places, gestures, bodies, and atmospheres that make up my intimate connection to the country. These contemporary images engage in a dialogue with the collages drawn from the archives: they extend, embody, and bring to life the narratives I had reconstructed from a distance. Today, BOSUBA stands at the intersection of these two realities the inherited and the lived. My intention is to make them coexist, to combine them, to let them influence one another, giving rise to a third reality: my own. A hybrid, ever-shifting reality, where identity is forged as much in memory as in experience, as much in the imagination as in reality.
Competitions
