Little Ghetto Boy

In Mounir Eddib’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, Little Ghetto Boy, the artist reimagines his own lived experience of growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the former coal-mining town of Genk (Limburg, Belgium). Inspired as a young boy by rappers such as Tupac, he now reworks these transatlantic cultural influences within his artistic practice.

Little Ghetto Boy is the title of a single by American soul legend Donny Hathaway (1945–1979). Hathaway powerfully evokes what it means to grow up in “a ghetto,” a poor and often stigmatized area in which minority communities are concentrated due to broader societal pressures. He sings about the hardships of such environments, but also about self-belief, resistance, and the possibility of change: “Everything has got to get better.”

Drawing on the writings of Black radical feminist bell hooks, the Little Ghetto Boy exhibition seeks to bring the daily lives of descendants of people who migrated to work in the mines “from margin to center.” Genk was known for its youth gangs in the 1980s, and to this day the city remains divided into districts linked to former mining sites. The exhibition not only establishes connections of solidarity with Black struggles against discrimination and inequality, but also critically examines how race, class, and gender intersect to shape lived experience in multicultural communities on this side of the Atlantic. This remains a pressing issue as people of North African descent continue to be dehumanized and instrumentalized as scapegoats in national political discourse.

Eddib’s work centers the humanity, dignity, and resilience of these often misrepresented communities, while also acknowledging their vulnerabilities. By depicting fragments of seemingly ordinary yet frequently overlooked domestic scenes and street settings, he brings those at the margins to the center stage. The result is an immersive, symbolically charged material assemblage. The gallery space is populated by house-like sculptures that evoke both an urban neighborhood and questions of belonging and safety. Oil paintings layered with shimmering trajectories of melted tin, alongside dark ink drawings on paper infused with lead, articulate narratives that move beyond reductive ghetto stereotypes.

Installation photographs by Jonathan de Waart.