HASSELT.- 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.

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.

In collaboration with Kunstplaats Vonk

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.