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Photographs that hang by the threads of a country at war

2023-01-03T04:46:36.345Z


'Rencontres de Bamako', the emblematic African biennial of photography, resumes its journey in the capital of Mali, bringing together the work of more than 50 contemporary artists from the continent


“Why not say it in Bambara, instead of using English or French?

To say that a person contains multiple persons.

This is the question asked by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the general curator of the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako (Mali), the African photography biennial that continues to be a world reference, despite the political winds that are raising dust in the Sahel.

The artistic meeting resumed its journey on December 8, 2022 and will keep the exhibitions open to the public until February 8, 2023, in various recognized spaces in the city, such as the Musée National du Mali, the Mémorial Modibo Keita, the Musée du District and the Galerie Médina, to which this year have been added the Maison Africaine de la Photographie and the old train station that connected Bamako with Dakar and Niamey,

The African world contains multiple living and imaginary beings, and is broader than the continent itself

Of the 350 applications submitted by photographers from all over the world, 50 were selected and, in addition, the curatorial team - among whom was Akinbode Akinbiyi, a renowned English photographer, curator and writer of Nigerian parents - chose another dozen established artists to complement the sample.

They are the

solid rocks

(solid stones, in English) that prop up the young talents that are making themselves known from the spacious banks of the great Niger River.

In the words of Bonaventure, the general commissioner, an attempt was made to ensure that no group was represented without a lack and "to work in the paradigm of poetry".

According to him, the African world contains multiple living and imaginary beings and is broader than the continent itself.

In effect, he explains, “the condition of a relationship is the difference, that there is an other”, in the same vein as the European philosophers but also the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ.

Precisely, the phrase

Maa Ka Maaya Ka Sa A Yere Kono,

which serves as a claim for this biennial, is from this scholar.

It means "the people within the person are multiple in the person" in Bambara.

The sample of the work 'Leave the edges' (leave the edges, in English), an audiovisual made by the Ghanaian photographer Baff Akoto.Baff Akoto

The role of culture in the construction of the nation

The Cameroonian Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, founder of the SAVVY Contemporary art and thought space and recently appointed director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, has been commissioned for the second time to curate the biennial.

A year and a half after the last coup and with jihadism besieging Malian territory, added to the weakened relations of the military government with the French tutelary power, "it is not easy to call and attend these meetings," he confesses.

Hence his special thanks to some 40 artists and the few international journalists who have been present at the opening of the event.

For this reason, Bonaventure is firm in arguing that culture cannot be left in the exclusive hands of governments, and urges the authorities to ask themselves questions such as "Does Mali want to continue with the biennial?", to which he himself answers : "Politicians understand the challenges and what is the role of culture in the construction of the nation and the importance of art, even in reconciliation."

Politicians understand the challenges and what is the role of culture in nation building and the importance of art, even in reconciliation

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, recently appointed director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin

In his opinion, there is "a lot to do, conceptually and financially" and, nevertheless, he is pleased, the organization has managed to print more than a thousand photos in local laboratories.

"I started in 2019 and I told myself that if I was working here it was to support the artistic ecosystem of this country and not to hold a festival in Mali and bring print runs from Europe," he says.

This is not a trivial matter, since one of the paradoxes of the great festivals is that of marginalizing local technicians, as has happened in some of the first editions of this biennial that was born in 1994, according to Bonaventure, who calls to rescue the tradition of local training from four decades ago, the fruit of the golden age of Malian photography: “We have to work to be independent”.

The truth is that, despite the immense difficulties that are visible in the daily life of the capital of Mali, people enthusiastically approach the exhibitions, adolescents enjoy the works with their teachers and the police officers take photos. in the rooms of the museum;

while the young visiting artists are already becoming citizens of Bamako.

Outside, the hot haze of sand and traffic and the rubbish making mountains set up the visual noise that someone will have to attenuate at some point.

Be independent and, at the same time, accept miscegenation

At the time of the awards, all the hubbub seems to rearrange itself.

At the recently opened Maison Africaine de la Fotographie, Ghanaian photographer Baff Akoto is awarded the Seydou Keita Grand Prix (worth 3,000 euros) for his work

Leave the

edges

.

, in English), an audiovisual that he himself conceives as a visual poem that has allowed him to “create a relevant language for self-awareness about the way of being in the world”.

In the short, he pays tribute to the spirituality that remains in the African diaspora, through rituals and contemporary dances;

for example, in the silhouettes that reveal flamenco steps, as a symbol of the miscegenation of artistic expressions.

After obtaining the award, Akoto comments that his intention is to show that today's culture is the result of emigration and ancestors.

The artist, who assumes heir to the Ashanti lineage, also feels like a Madrid citizen, because he lives in the capital of Spain for a good part of the year.

"Spain is a very African place, where I have family, and, furthermore, Madrid is on the way to Africa," he adds.

The audiovisual exhibition 'The tea women of Sudan', by the Sudanese Ebti Nabag.Ebti Nabag

The exhibition is conceived in five chapters that refer to a poem by Aimé Cesaire, father of "Negritude".

Thus, the first chapter evokes the 'House made of not knowing where to go', and it is opened by the Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons with three series between 1990 and 2010, which narrate what Nigerian heritage means in different places.

Another name to note in this section is that of the Sudanese Ebti Nabag, with

The Tea Women of Sudan

, an audiovisual about the ladies who earn a living in street tea stalls in the streets of Khartoum.

Also noteworthy in this first section are the images of the

fanzine

by Attiyah Khan, a South African

disc jockey

of Muslim Indian descent, who has compiled album covers that she has found in stores around the world, with Arabic calligraphy and from various African countries. .

Rotations of the Bismillah

, such the title of her series —which won the third prize, the Bisi Silva—, intends to celebrate the tradition of music in Islam on the continent, just as she herself does in her

sets

, which make people travel and dance attendees with rhythms that go from the Maghreb to Johannesburg.

Spain is a very African place, where I have family, and, furthermore, Madrid is on the way to Africa

Baff Akoto, Ghanaian photographer

Chapter two recalls the 'House made of fan fingers'.

Here, Elijah Ndoumbe presents the record of his work with

queer

and transgender workers from Cape Town, South Africa, among other photographers and plastic artists who make explicit the intersections that are created in each particular biography of an African, through mixed techniques, interventions developing, painting and engraving.

History under a poetic magnifying glass

The third chapter is inspired by the 'House made of mustard seeds', to talk about presences and traditions, and starts with the series of two consecrated ones: that of the English photographer Joy Gregory and that of the Moroccan filmmaker Daoud Aoulad-Syad.

However, in this section, the work that really leaves its mark on the viewer is that of the Guatemalan artist Ixmucané Aguilar on the Namibian genocide, which occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, through an audiovisual that, lyrically, recalls the fields German concentration camps that stretched along the Namibian beaches.

The installation is completed with a book of portraits of the descendants of the victims.

It also highlights the work of the dreamlike atmosphere of the Moroccan photographer Imane Djamil.

For her part, the young

queer

artist Mallory Lowe Mpoka, of Belgian and Cameroonian descent, was honored for her series of embroidered archival photographs,

The Architecture of Oneself: What Lives Inside Us

.

She won the second Malick Sidibe Prize,

jointly

with Malian filmmaker Aicha Diallo, for

Musolu

(women, in Bambara), a short film exploring Malian tradition.

One of the works by English photographer Joy Gregory on display at the African Photography Biennale in Mali.Joy Gregory

Chapter four, related to the 'House made of the feathers of fallen angels', refers to the stories of dispersals and connections, and in this chapter highlights the work that Fatoumata Diabaté does with the Association of Women Photographers of Mali, founded in 2007. It is an interactive activity with the citizens of Bamako, as Diabaté explains it: “We rent the green minibuses that go from neighborhood to neighborhood (they have a strong identity in our capital) and we do the normal circuit, encouraging people to go up".

In March 2022, some 10 photographers began this project in a dozen neighborhoods of the capital, where, at the end of each itinerary, a projection was made.

The fifth is the 'House of Deluge Storms', about transitions and the supernatural, which so naturally inhabit Africa.

The first prize of this edition of the biennial, that of Baff Akoto, came out of this section and, in it, one can also admire the honesty through the lenses of the Sudanese Salih Basheer, the Brazilian Uiler Costa-Santos and Américo Hunguana, who presents the black and white landscape of the only (and abandoned) bullring in Mozambique.

In all cases, these are photographs that agree with the general commissioner when he assures that he does not want to talk about "rematches" and that it is no longer possible to erase the borders of Africa, that we must "work with them", if anything. , deconstruct them.

In his opinion, and paraphrasing James Baldwin, "the role of culture is to give questions to the answers that already exist."

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-03

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