In this episode of arts24, we meet Ghanaian-Dutch visual artist Joel Quayson, who won the 2025 Dior Prize for Photography and Visual Arts for Young Talents, one of the most closely watched awards in contemporary photography. Born to Ghanaian parents and raised in the Netherlands within a devout Christian household, Quayson’s work is shaped by the tension between faith, cultural heritage and queer self-expression. That deeply personal conflict lies at the heart of his prize-winning video “How do you feel?”, now on view at Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP).
The film unfolds as a meditative self-portrait, moving between the figure of the “good son”, disciplined and shaped by religious expectations, and a rhinestone-clad ballroom dancer embodying queer joy and defiance. Quayson confronts the dualities he carries. The repeated question “How do you feel?” becomes both mantra and reckoning, an invitation to radical honesty in the face of silence and stigma.
He created the work during his second year at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, submitting it to the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles under the theme “Face-to-Face”.
In conversation with arts24, Quayson reflects on vulnerability, family pride and silence, and on whether faith, culture and queerness must remain opposing forces, or whether they can coexist. As photography marks its 200th anniversary, he also considers what the medium can still do in a world saturated with images.
Joel Quayson’s exhibition “How Do You Feel” runs at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris until April.
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