On 21 October 2003 the fifth Biennial for African Photography opened at the National Museum of Mali. This was the first station in a five-day series of openings at twelve different exhibition venues all over Bamako. In a newly erected hall of the National Museum, works by Seydou Keïta, Van Leo and Mohammed Dib were shown as an homage to these recently deceased photographers.

When »Rencontres de la Photographie à Bamako« was founded back in 1994, its main purpose was to link the international fame achieved by photographer Seydou Keïta back to the place where he had worked. Rencontres also succeeded in creating an institutional framework within Africa for the widespread interest in African photography that had emerged since the nineties, as manifested by numerous exhibitions, publications and journals. In virtually every text written on these presentations, the goal was formulated of freeing the image of Africa from its exotic, ethnographic overtones and giving Africans back their own image of the continent and its history. Since in Africa the lack of infrastructure for exhibitions or for the distribution of publications makes it much more difficult to access information on the history of African photography than it is in the West, the Biennial, with its abundance of material, plays an immensely important role in this respect.

Seydou Keïta is today one of the most well-known African photographers, and the reception of his work demonstrates the whole range of problems associated with commercial and ideological appropriation. Keïta’s work could be regarded as complete long before his »discovery«: self-taught, he began taking photographs at the end of the thirties, and in 1948, at a time when Bamako was evolving into a modern metropolis, he established his own studio with laboratory, which he maintained until 1963.

From the very first time his photos were presented, attributed to an »Unknown Photographer«1 at the »Africa Explores« show in New York in 1991, he rapidly took on the role of leading protagonist in the reception of African studio photography, as well as becoming the »Talk of the Town«2 on the New York art scene. In an »Artforum« article of that title by Manthia Diawara – as in many other texts about his work – Keïta is praised particularly for giving expression to African modernism and for helping his clients to present themselves as modern Bamakois. However, as Diawara also divines in his article, the true quality of Keïta’s photos lies in the fact that they elucidate the insecure footing of many Bamakois in this brand of modernity infused with traditionalism. One can’t help but suspect that picking up the scent of this insecurity is what helps to assure the enthusiastic western viewers of their own superiority. By virtue of the fact that they make the cracks in the self-portrayal of those pictured transparent in this way, Keïta’s photos might also be viewed as a critical testimony to the historicity of the African Modern.

Similar to the way in which western reception of traditional African art was influenced by the conviction that only the western connoisseur was actually able to discern its quality, Keïta’s authorship was also repressed. It began with the loss of his name and continued after his »discovery« with the dispatching of a large portion of his archive of negatives to Paris by André Magnin, art dealer and publisher of a monograph on Keïta. Ever since then, a Paris photo lab has been making prints in sizes up to 175 by 125 centimeters. The negatives are handled here like documentary material, by including their frames in the prints, with visible traces of the holding mechanism in the camera. In 2001, shortly before his death, Keïta founded the »Association Seydou Keïta«, which since that time has been trying to deploy legal means to get some 1,000 negatives back from Magnin. In a presentation accompanying the Biennial, which took place in the headquarters of this association, some of the original prints from the fifties were on view. Magnin is certainly to thank for the »rediscovery« of the photos, and perhaps also for rescuing them from destruction, but for purposes of preserving the photo archive as cultural heritage, it is crucial that institutions be developed that are willing to undertake this task in a financially disinterested manner.

One such initiative is the »Fondation Arabe pour l'Image«, an independent non-profit organization that collects, preserves and restores photos, archives and estates from photographers in the Arab region. The foundation’s archive in Beirut is now also taking on conservation tasks and storage for foreign photo collections, including 4,000 negatives from Van Leo. Central to the foundation’s work is research to procure material and information on the works in the archive, which data is then recorded digitally and is soon to be made available on the Internet. The second major task is to present the collection to the public by way of numerous exhibitions, publications and films, for example Akram Zaatari’s video »her + him Van Leo«.

At the Biennial, the »Fondation Arabe pour l'Image« exhibited private photos by Youssef Saffiedine, likewise at Mali’s National Museum. Saffiedine comes from one of the many Lebanese families that have settled in Africa. He opened a photo studio in Dakar in 1958, which is working today mainly as a color laboratory. The photos show him with his wife, whom he is usually touching gently, as a happily married couple. Their foreign status as Lebanese in Senegal is captured by the photos’ setting, styled like a modern love story. Van Leo’s life story also began with the migration of his family, who came to the Arab world as Armenian refugees. Van Leo began his career in Cairo during the forties, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan metropolis. His fascination with photos from Hollywood fired his imagination and inspired him to experiment with dramatic lighting, extravagant accessories and elaborate settings. For this generation of African photographers, the international scope of the Modern formed the content and ideal of their work. This allowed Saffiedine and Van Leo in Dakar and Cairo to integrate themselves into the broader scene, and with their stylizations Keïta was able to open the door to big-city life in Bamako for his countrified migrants.

The Bamako Biennial is a coproduction of the Mali Cultural Ministry and the »Association française d'action artistique« (AFAA) of the French Foreign Ministry, which sponsors many cultural projects in Africa and to a large extent organizes the Biennial from its Paris headquarters. The first biennials were devoted to exploring the tradition of African photography. Starting with the fourth Rencontres in 2001, Simon Njami 3 took on the artistic direction and substantially extended the scope of the program: this year the Biennial includes an international exhibition he himself curated, as well as individual, country-based and theme-related presentations. For the first time in the history of the Biennial, a non-African country was invited: Akinbode Akinbiyi, a Nigerian photographer living in Berlin, presented eight young photographers from Germany, supplemented by a selection of German photographs from the collection of FNAC, the French »Fonds national d'art contemporain«, which since 1981 has been purchasing some 600 to 1,000 photographs per year.

Simon Njami entitled this latest installment of the Biennial »Rites sacrés, rites profanes«. In his catalogue essay he indulges freely in religious philosophy rather than maintaining the cool rationality of the Modern. With a tendency to essentialism, he attributes to Africans a unique spirituality, which gives rise to a special relationship to images and photographs. However, he does not use this paradigm to directly interpret any of the works he has chosen, but rather leaves it to the viewer to place the works within this frame of reference.

The prominent positioning of large black and white prints by Santu Mofokeng from South Africa as the largest single exhibit aside from the work of the old guard of African photography, turns him into the Biennial’s main protagonist for contemporary African photography. His work often shows religiously resonant places and can itself be understood as testimony to a ritual act. A series of landscapes shot out of the window of a moving train or car at first seem transient and void of any particular content. The locations indicated in their titles, Ho Chi Minh City, Belgium and Kwa Zulu, call up associations with these places’ history as theaters of war, colonialism or occupation, providing a clue as to what connects them as a series. This principle of relating everyday or banal-seeming situations with history-laden and mythical places is played out in Mofokeng’s photos and in the sequence in which they are hung: the »Ancestral Caves« are made profane by the laundry hung there, probably by their present-day inhabitants. The self-portrait of the photographer in front of a brick wall shaped by a reflection in a window only takes on weight with the addition of the title - »Auschwitz«. The works of Mofokeng and others in the Biennial manifest a new definition of the view of foreign places and the view of the familiar as something foreign. By placing his photos of South Africa in the same row as photos of Germany, Mofokeng links his view of Europe with that of his own surroundings. While the dichotomy of the self versus the Other is lifted, allowing the self to be projected at will, the localization of the self goes missing and it is seen as something foreign. In the glass surfaces that frequently appear in his photos, the view through the pane often overlaps with what is reflected from the inside, so that the self is seen as situated in the Other.

In addition to the other solo exhibitions, with works by photographers Eustaquio Neves (Brazil), Nabil Butros (Egypt), John Maluka (Zimbabwe) and André Albany (La Réunion), national curators also offered compilations of works from the countries of Egypt, Mozambique, Senegal, Zimbabwe and the Cuban diaspora. The majority of the photographers Simon Njami selected for these displays work in an international context and have studied and exhibited outside of Africa; most live in the diaspora or have binational parents. Njami thus deliberately emphasizes the internationality of African artists. The catalogue includes detailed biographical information on each photographer.

One theme seems to run like a common thread through many of the works shown at the Biennial, namely a kind of self-questioning in which photography is used as a medium able to create an outside, a distance from the self. The emancipation of the image of Africa from the colonial perspective becomes an impulse for these photographers to work through these alien, but nonetheless on some level internalized images. Processing such images and the ideology bound up with them takes on a ritual dimension.

Ingrid Mwangi, a Kenyan artist living in Germany, writes in her catalogue text: »I have developed the artistic strategy of taking on the role of the other.« This questioning of her own identity also entails a mystification of the self, in which Mwangi casts herself in the role of victim. Fatimah Tuggar, a Nigerian living in the USA, uses digital media to juxtapose clichéd images of Africa and the USA taken from advertising and mass media in grotesque and comical combinations, bereft of any possibility of authenticity.

Conspicuous at this Biennial, as at similar events during the past few years, is the strong presence of North African artists. They are also involved in working their way through an alien, orientalizing image of their culture, in which they can to some extent themselves participate, and which is so firmly anchored that reality and projection have become virtually inseparable: Susan Hefuna, an Egyptian-German artist, places herself in »oriental« spaces, defined as such by wooden screens dividing inside from outside. The artist shifts her self-portrayal in this space onto an unreal plane through the technique of fading – reminiscent of old, poorly fixed photographs. The photos were printed on long lengths of fabric and hung in such a way as to create a direct dialogue with the display space, the Foyer des Palais de la Culture, with its screen-like open outer wall. The selection of young German photographers also reveals an interest in the ethnographic view of one’s own culture: Zoltan Jókay, for example, shows young people in Germany in a series entitled »Coming of Age«, echoing Margaret Mead’s classic ethnology study.

In addition to the broad spectrum of artistic photography, also featured in the national presentation of Egyptian photographers selected by Negar Azimi, and the Cuban contribution curated by Nelson Ramirez de Arellano Conde, traditional reporting and documentary photography was also on view: Bruno Z’Graggen chose 15 photographers from Mozambique, who work in the politically involved school of black and white photography founded by Ricardo Rangel. Likewise dedicated to the tradition of documentary photography was Zimbabwe’s national presentation, which showed the well-known stereotypes of government arbitrariness and oppression, only that here oppressor and victim had changed places and now the white farmers were shown being threatened and abused by a black police force.

The exhibition program was accompanied by numerous seminars and workshops, nightly slide shows and »Contours«, a parallel program open to local photographers, encompassing initiatives throughout the city and in part spreading out onto the public space of the streets. By opening itself up in this way, the Biennial not only addressed the city’s inhabitants, but also – through the internationality of the photographers invited to participate – the international audience as well. It offered itself as a model solution to the question of how African art as such can be presented, especially on the African continent – an issue that gave rise to much controversy in connection with the biennials in Johannesburg and Dakar. While the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial, in 1997 under the direction of Okwui Enwezor, made its international orientation perfectly clear in its title, »Trade Routes«, it found itself at odds with the agendas of local interest groups. The show was criticized as an event that completely ignored the local situation, and has since been suspended. The Dakar Biennial, on the other hand, despite witnessing its own share of attacks, is still being promoted by Senegal’s Ministry of Culture as a national prestige event, one at which Senegalese artists are unabashedly favored in both the selection process and the conferral of awards.

Finally, the question must still be touched upon of how this biennial of African photography defines the category of »African«. With its inclusion of the diaspora context, which is nowhere explicitly stated, the category is interpreted quite broadly and includes many regions into which Africans were displaced or to which they have migrated, for example Haiti and Cuba (but not the USA). This diaspora can of course not be separated from the respective countries and regions and their other inhabitants, meaning that it is impossible to draw any kind of demarcation line.

In addition to opening up the concept of African culture, Njami also undertakes the balancing act of trying at the same time to essentialistically elevate it to a culture that, borrowing from the theory of classic »negritude«, is characterized by a special spirituality. Despite all the problems inherent in this approach, he still manages to give a broad spectrum of photographic practices a common context and to connect photographers from all over the world to the African continent. Fatimah Tuggar, who received the Jury Prize, expressed gratitude for this effort: »It’s wonderful to come back to Africa and to find my work so appreciated here.«

 

Translated by Jenny Taylor-Gaida

 

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