In spring 2025, the Institut pour la photographie is taking up the convivial spaces of the Théâtre du Nord for the third time with the exhibition Just My Luck, designed by Belgian artists Katherine Longly and Cécile Hupin around drawing, scratching and gambling games.*
Hybrid and offbeat, this project, which combines photographic media with archival documents, objects and plastic productions, confronts the dream with reality by plunging us into a series of testimonies of winners, losers and their relatives.
The stories that punctuate the exhibition question the tenuous link between luck and bad luck, but also say a lot about our society, its aspirations, its beliefs and its relationship to money... Far from seeking to tell the truth of the facts, the exhibition gives the protagonists a voice by letting them expose the subjectivity of their feelings.
Human beings have always dreamed of the small miracle that could change their lives. The invention of lottery games has swung pure fantasy into the realm of the feasible. It would be enough a little luck to see all our dreams come true.
But what is luck? And is not this notion of luck inextricably linked to that of bad luck, as if believing in one was to risk activating the other?
It is said that almost two thousand years ago, the young Roman emperor Heliogabalus was already playing. He organized a lottery that promised players some very attractive prizes: lands, ministerial mandates or slaves... And others much less: animal carcasses, venomous snakes... or a death sentence.
If lottery games are no longer being played in such a cruel way, one can still wonder what drives two out of three adults to play them regularly when we know that “money is not happiness”.
Katherine Longly is a photographer and visual artist. Cécile Hupin is a set designer and author. They share a strong taste for encounters and true stories. Together, they create projects that reflect with tenderness and humour the extraordinary and ferociously revealing realities of the world in which we live.
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March 8 will mark the first event launching the exhibition with a raffle, a nod to the mechanics of chance explored by artists.
From 5 pm, guided tours by the artists will be offered, followed by the opportunity to participate in the raffle. The draw will take place at 6 pm, accompanied by an interpretation of the song of the Zérommillionnaires by Cécile Hupin. This moment will end with a convivial time around a shared drink until 7pm.