Along with the Biennale of African Art in Dakar, launched in 1992, the»Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie«, which have been held in Bamako since 1994, rank among the (few) important regular exhibitions of contemporary African art on the African continent. Whilst most of the major exhibitions on African art produced in Europe or the USA never reach that continent (or just make it to South Africa), due to a lack of money, structures and political will here, the Biennales in Dakar und Bamako, like the somewhat older film festivals in Ouagadougou and Carthage, serve as meeting places for artist and art world professionals from right across Africa, as well as attracting a modest number of art fans from Europe and to a lesser extent from other regions around the globe. To an even greater extent than »Dak’art«, the Photography Biennale being held in Bamako for the seventh time conveys the impression that links between France and its former West African colonies are still strong. This is the fourth successive »Rencontres« curated by Paris-based Simon Njami, who last summer also curated the somewhat unsuccessful Africa Pavilion at the Venice Biennale together with Fernando Alvim, and the whole event is being funded by Mali’s Ministry of Culture together with CULTURESFRANCE, which is backed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Culture. A long list of French logos adorns the catalogue and poster, which were produced in France, and the panels on problems in the market for African photography comprise a disproportionate number of French gallery-owners and photo experts. Whilst »Dak’art« has often been criticised for organisational shortcomings, the programme in Bamako has run almost without a hitch. The events announced take place, and what occurs corresponds on the whole to Western conceptions of time schedules and orderly running of events. Whilst visitors may well appreciate this, it does inevitably also make you think of the »positive aspects« of colonialism.

The main part of the exhibition is shown in the Musée National du Mali, which was only recently re-opened and whose collection of traditional art from the area now covered by Mali is small - when compared with European museums full of looted art - but outstanding, with its agreeably unpretentious presentation of its sculptures and textiles contrasting with the approach in Western collections. This main exhibition is on a relatively modest scale, with smaller groups of works by around 30 artists all squeezed together within a fairly small space. This time the exhibition takes as its topic »Dans la ville et au-delà« (»In the city and beyond«). The medium of photography and the theme of the city have close historical ties, and from that perspective this is not necessarily a precisely defined framework. African cities have seen pronounced, and in some cases dramatic, changes over the last few decades, and as a result the focus here on images of more or less significant situations taken from the photographic perspective of passers-by cannot really be said to be entirely satisfying. On the other hand, one must admit that this is not just another theme-based exhibition, but above all a cross-section of contemporary African photography. Simon Njami’s selection often proves to be a top-notch choice of pieces, both technically and aesthetically: many works, such as those by Michael Tsegaye from Ethiopia, Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi from Zimbabwe or Andrew Tshabangu from South Africa, can be understood both as good photos and as records documenting everyday traffic problems and extreme labour worlds, or rather the inventive strategies devised to get to grips with all this. In a fair number of the works presented here, it is clear that the photographers who shot the images either work on reportages for magazines or come from that background. Conceptual or performative approaches are in the minority here. Amongst the exceptions to these pieces, which adhere closely to the object or to the notion of a good picture, we find works by Egyptian photographer Nabil Boutros, who addresses images of history manifested in built form in his country, Sammy Baloji’s attempts to capture the violent recent history of the Congo and inject it into contemporary shots of mining sites using montage techniques, and »Certains Matins« by Mohamed Camara (Mali), a poetic study on personal encounters in the borderlands between dream and reality. Via a video exhibition, the Biennale seeks for the first time to manoeuvre around the constraints of (pure) photography when it comes to capturing more complex subject-matter and dynamic situations; the video section is shown in a striking building in the town centre, where works by ten artists whose works are all now shown fairly frequently, such as Moataz Nasr, Zoulikha Bouabdellah or Berry Bickle, will be on display, grouped together under the title »Nouvelles Images«, for as long (i.e. for as short a time) as the technology keeps working given the heat and lack of staff.

Even before you go into any of the exhibitions in Bamako, you have already registering the pervasive presence of French telecommunications giant Orange, whose prepaid cards are sold by countless street traders and whose signs can be spotted from afar, dotting the streets. At least during the opening week, the Quartiers d’Orange, giant halls of a hangar in the industrial area, used by the Fondation Orange Mali for exhibitions, concerts, a restaurant and other projects, seem to be the real social centre of the Biennale. The firm, which dominates the market in several countries in Africa (the mobile telephony market is grow at a rate of fifty per cent per annum), views its activities here as part-and-parcel of its social responsibility. The range of projects on offer here means visitors and participants at the Biennale find this location cooler than the official exhibition venues. Alongside numerous projects with pronounced ties to France, either structurally or in terms of those involved, Malick Sidibé, the grand old man of photography in Mali, whose life-work has just been awarded a Golden Lion in Venice, is also feted enthusiastically. Then there’s another legend, this time a musical one, namely the Bamako Rail Band, which emerged onto the scene in the 1960s like Sidibé and took on particular importance, just as he did, in shaping how the independent nation viewed its own cultural image. Here they perform in Malick Sidibé outfits made for the occasion and, entirely in keeping with the country’s griot tradition, praise the photographer they are celebrating in specially composed songs, so beautiful and powerful that you simply forget the neo-colonial setting. If Sidibé, who is 70 now and still running the small photo studio from which he gave Mali’s post-colonial youth culture its definitive images, can be said to be (or to have been) straddling the line demarcating professional photographers from artists, in its small retrospective of Samuel Fosso’s work, the Biennale presents a man who strikingly transgressed this demarcation line. In his youth in Central Africa, Fosso, originally from Cameroon but raised in Nigeria, had already engaged in performative self-staging parallel to work commissioned by various customers, and has continued until this day to extend this performative element by crossing countless borders between gender roles, cultural signifiers and historical epochs. In a more recent series, »Le rêve de mon grand-père« Fosso, after all the performative variations of the modern African, ventures to reconstruct the pre-colonial subject, which depicts the artist himself as an old, tradition-bound ancestor at the other end of the very spectrum that he opened up in the 1970s with the narcissism of youthful self-invention.

In Bamako, the Cinéma Numérique Ambulant, which has already been in operation for several years, demonstrates how the significant tradition of African studio photography can be translated into contemporary practice. The collective journeys from village to village and to various urban neighbourhoods with a screen, cameras to take photos and projection equipment, and photographs children, as well as young and old people from each community in front of the various digital backgrounds in their selection (from the desert to the square in front of Vienna’s Town Hall at Christmas), offers the keen subjects various outfits to wear, then shows the images to the subjects’ own community in the evening with live music by way of entertainment – not forgetting to add a good pinch of art photography, in this case from the Biennale, and rounding off the whole programme with short films related to photography. CNA is an example of how it is possible to succeed – precisely by providing light-hearted entertainment – in bringing together cultural, education and social work in societies that are to a large degree illiterate, and evokes not only Soviet mobile cinemas but also Ousmane Sembène’s maxim that cinema is the evening school of the people. Yes, some of CNA’s budget does come from French and European funding, but this project’s attitude has little to do with the often nauseating flavour of African art worlds in the French backyard.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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