Revue de presse #22 – Janvier 2015

ACTUALITÉ DES PHOTOGRAPHES

Oualid Khelifi wants to challenge your concepts of African belonging, Africa is a Country, par Boima Tucker, le 29/01/15 ;

“Having lived, travelled and worked in various West African countries as an independent multimedia journalist, throughout the years I’ve grown increasingly convinced of the need to foster mobility and exchange between different regions of the continent.

As an Algerian, I’ve brewed a frustration of seeing my co-citizens and other North Africans missing out on incredibly vibrant regions south of the Sahara, as we remain in the Maghreb exclusively locked to the Middle East, Europe and former colonial powers.”

Andrew Esiebo: Social Identities and Cultural Imaginaries in West Africa Through the Barbershop Lens, par Marian Nur Goni, Leica Camera Blog, le 29/01/15 ;

“(…) I became really fascinated by the barbers’ uses of vernacular iconography to engage and attract the customers, but also to reflect their own voices. I was really interested in seeing how in the barbershops’ icons reflect not only religion, faith, and politics, but also sexy symbolism and popular culture blended, as posters of pop stars like Jay Z, 50 Cent, Tupac, etc. may be found on their walls. I think this complicates the way we see their world and how they use their spaces to reflect personal beliefs and collective imaginaries through the installations they create in their shops.”

Boubacar Touré Mandémory: Militant Photographer and Urban Senegalese Colorist, par Marian Nur Goni, Leica Camera Blog, le 22/01/15 ;

“I’m very active on Facebook because I think it’s an effective and free way to exhibit your work and all the more so for all those who gravitate in a context not suited to exposing photography. By building a significant network, we can benefit today from the same visibility as a photographer whose works are exhibited in American museums or European galleries.”

Dans cet entretien, Mandémory revient également sur tout un pan de l’histoire de la photographie au Sénégal, en évoquant la création de l’agence Ecomar Visual en 1989 et du premier Mois de la Photo à Dakar.

Pour ce photographe, voir aussi : Boubacar Touré Mandémory dénonce le délabrement de Rufisque en photos, par Sabine Cessou, RFI, le 9/01/15 ;

Les identités féminines de Héla Ammar, par Jeanne Mercier, L’Oeil de la photographie, le 21/01/15 ;

“Héla Ammar est née à Tunis en 1969. Elle est artiste visuelle, docteur en droit et universitaire. Co-auteur d’une enquête sur les couloirs de la mort en Tunisie, elle a récemment développé un ensemble d’installations sonores et visuelles dépeignant pour la première fois l’univers carcéral tunisien. S’inspirant de son quotidien, elle a souvent choisi de se mettre en scène, pour s’exprimer sur des sujets qui participent à cerner les contours d’une identité féminine sans cesse en mouvement. Plus généralement, son travail photographique ne cesse de questionner la notion d’identité au-delà des références et conventions sociales, politiques et religieuses.”

Léonard Pongo: Nothing But Ordinary Congo, par Marian Nur Goni, Leica Camera Blog, le 19/01/15 ;

“I’ve undertaken several projects in DRC since 2011. In my work, I’ve tried to understand daily Congolese life and to become an integral part of it. I spent several months photographing my family’s life in several towns in the country (Kinshasa, Kananga, and Lubumbashi). My photos are deeply influenced by my various encounters and the desire of certain friends, members of my family, and people I didn’t know to share their reality with me and to include me in their daily lives. (…) My aim wasn’t to show the crises and conflicts – the most widely represented subjects when it comes to the DRC. Instead, I wanted to see what impact these conflicts have on daily life and to understand how the country exists outside these flashpoints which, while major, nonetheless remain episodic. I wanted to complete and recreate my own vision of the country thanks to my encounters.”

A Fosso Walk, par Emmanuel Iduma, Painting is Dead, le 12/01/15 ;

Jide Adeniyi-Jones: Photography Forced Me To Establish a Point of View, par Marian Nur Goni, Leica Camera blog, le 12/01/15 ;

“Peacekeeping interested me because I am from Nigeria; I felt that in Nigeria we could probably form a fairly uniform consensus that the military takeover of government in the country was the worst thing that had happened to the country since colonialism. The Nigerian Army overthrew the government in 1966. The officers who carried out the coup claimed to be correcting societal ills but that event triggered cycles of coups and counter-coups with the attendant brutalization of the society for the next forty odd years.

I had always heard that the Nigerian military had an excellent reputation in peacekeeping operations. In fact, one of Nigeria’s first acts as an independent nation was to send peacekeepers, under the auspices of the United Nations, to the Congo in 1960. So the army that represented corruption, bullying, betrayal within the country stood for self-sacrifice, honor and protection abroad. I felt that I might be able to use it as a metaphor to illustrate that our national dilemma was not a simplistic black and white situation but was far more complex shades of grey.”

Mack Magagane: Constructing with the Already Constructed, par Marian Nur Goni, Leica Camera blog, le 07/01/15 ;

“In my daily experiences, my camera becomes a tool, a tangible third-eye that does not reason but takes the actual event without forgetting what it has seen. With this device with its own memory, I explore the odd and peculiar or thought-of to be unsafe place. I place myself in a vulnerable state (whether to crime, emotion, privation or naivety – personal encounters that are common amongst us) and creating what is/would be aesthetically pleasing to one’s eye, but could be also be read in a critical context relative to where the image has been taken or the current issues and affairs the overall oeuvre is created; one with subjective direction.”

OUVRAGES

David Goldblatt on Ranjith Kally’s ‘Memory Against Forgetting’, Mail & Guardian, le 30/01/15 ;

David Goldblatt’s “Particulars”, par Genevieve Fussel, The New-Yorker, le 22/01/15 ;

“In 1975, while shooting portraiture during the height of apartheid, the South African photographer David Goldblatt became fascinated by how people composed themselves in front of his camera. “What became apparent to me as I worked,” he  told me, “was that, in our body language, in our clothing, in our decoration, we often declared our values.” For six months, he photographed only the details of people’s bodies—the arrangement of their limbs, the placement of their hands, and other minor gestures that he referred to as “particulars.””

See Zanele Muholi’s Powerful Portraits of the LGBTI Experience in South Africa, par Erica Schwiegershausen, The Cut, le 7/01/15 ;

Hairstyles That Ascend, and Aspire, in Nigeria, par Whitney Richardson, Lens – The New York Times, le 2/01/15 ;

EXPOSITIONS

The Many Modern-Day Kings and Queens of Nigeria, par Jordan G. Teicher, Slate, le 27/01/14 ;

“An upcoming exhibit at the Newark Museum, “Royals and Regalia: Inside the Palaces of Nigeria’s Monarchs,” collects photos from George Osodi’s ongoing project, which has taken him into the palaces of more than 20 kings and queens all over the country. The project is intended to show off Nigeria’s history and cultural complexity, and to promote harmony in a country often torn apart by ethnic and religious conflict.”

(…) “These kings, some of them have had ancestors who were kings in the early days of slavery. Some were kings in the early days of the Europeans capturing various kingdoms. Some were heavily humiliated, and they were photographed in ways that were dehumanizing by some of these captors in the early days of colonialism,” Osodi said. “I wanted to now show them in the modern day as true kings of the 21^st century.”

Tunde Owolabi brings Aso-Oke weaving to the gallery, par Kathleen Bomani, Africa is a Country, le 26/01/15 ;

Pieter Hugo, photographe sud-africain, France Inter, émission “Regardez, Voir”, le 15/01/15 ;

(Autour de l’exposition “Kin” qui a lieu à la Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson du 14 janvier au 26 avril 2015)

« Les photographes face à l’environnement » (Goethe-Institut Dakar, du 21/01/15 au 20/02/15), Contemporary And, sans date ;

REPRÉSENTATIONS DU CONTINENT ET DE SES HABITANTS

We need new stories – Part 2, par Rachel Hamada, This is Africa, le 15/01/15 ;

YZ and Her ‘Amazone’ Warrior Women On Senegalese Walls, par Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, The Huffington Post, le 14/01/15 ;

“I want to show warriors from ancient times; revolutionists, anti-colonialists, intellectual women who have written the story of Africa. We need figures to be proud of our roots, to keep fighting for our rights, and to write the story of tomorrow.”

(…) “While doing research on women in Africa, I have been compiling a photographic archive,” she says. “I’ve been searching for the places that could come into resonance with the subject. I’m looking for locations that communicate the historic perspective of the project as well as those that may draw a parallel with present issues.”

Royal photo puts race and power in focus, par Jonathan Jones, Mail & Guardian, le 1/01/15 ;

LES ANNONCES DU MOIS

La Biennale de Bamako lance son appel à candidatures pour l’édition 2015 (date limite : le 30 mars 2015).

En français :
http://ifprog.institutfrancais.com/…/Rencontres-de-Bamako-2…

En anglais :
http://ifprog.institutfrancais.com/…/Rencontres-de-Bamako-2…

(A propos de ce festival, voir aussi l’historique retracé par Talia Lieber, Fulbright Fellow in Rwanda, dans son blog “Talia in Rwanda” : https://taliarwanda.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/an-introduction-to-the-bamako-biennale/)

Les 9èmes Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie de Ghar el Melh lancent également leur appel à candidatures, ouvert jusqu’au 2 avril 2015.

Enfin, le site du MAFOTO – International Maputo Foto Festival, qui se tiendra du 25 juin au 25 juillet prochains – est en ligne : http://mafoto.org/about/

Prix

Ângela Ferreira, Ayrson Heráclito e Edson Chagas finalistas do Novo Banco Photo, par Sérgio B. Gomes, Publico, le 28/01/2015

VARIA

Okwui Enwezor, l’homme de l’art, par Roxana Azimi, M le magazine du Monde, le 23/01/15 ;

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