Forget Me Not (nyc diary)

For her first exhibition with that’s what x said, Dinaya Waeyaert displays a series of
photographs that she took during her travels to New York between 2022 and 2023. The title of her exhibition, Forget Me Not (nyc diary), is an homage to the lost memories she documents to reflect her search for intimacy and lesbian love in a place as vast as New York City.

With this new body of work, the artist highlights her love for the city and the importance of the people she met there. While starting out exploring loneliness and the lack of human connection in such a big city, the artist captures love, intimacy, and vulnerability in all of her subjects. Her photographs are an invitation into the subject’s life, into their own environments. Wherever she goes, Dinaya Waeyaert is always on the lookout for her people, and eager to be inspired by them. This exhibition is an ode to queer happiness, community, and her love for New York City. 

Dinaya Waeyaert is a Belgian artist based in Brussels whose medium of choice is photography,  shot on 35mm and medium format film. She has recently been printing her images manually in a color photo darkroom. Her photographic work is filled with snapshots, portraits and self portraits complemented with details of the city. Dinaya Waeyaert interprets her work as her way of highlighting the importance of lesbian visibility, which she achieves by capturing their stories. Her art is like a visual diary, documentary, poetic and personal, in which she preserves memories of moments filled with love and sensitivity. She has always turned her camera to capture the people around her, her photographs becoming a witness to her souvenirs, like her own family album.

‘I’ve always loved to photograph the people around me. This might have something to do with how I grew up. Being aware of my own sexuality at a very young age made me wonder if there were others like me. Secretly I have always been looking for them; the ones that feel like me, act like me and who are in search for each other too. From the moment I found them I started capturing their existence.’

After completing her studies in Visual Arts in Ghent in 2018, Dinaya Waeyaert self-published her first book Personal Collection. In 2021, she published Come Closer with Dienacht Publishing. Since 2015 she has exhibited both nationally and internationally, notably at Enfant Sauvage Brussels, Cloud Gallery in Amsterdam, Tique Art Space during Antwerp Art and Brussels Gallery Weekend. She was nominated for the Kassel Dummy Award and participated in the Soirée Belge of Recyclart at Arles Photo. Her work was included in numerous publications, such as Vice, i-D UK and De Standaard.