Rencontres de Bamako, chapter 2– A House made of Fingers
The Rencontres de Bamako– Africain biennal of Photography provides a high-flying 2022 edition, focused on “multiplicity, difference, ending up being and heritage”. Our reporter Arthur Dayras reports on the second exhibit arranged in the city’s former railway station.
The train station in Bamako is an iconic place in the Malian capital. Without its passengers, without its trains, it excites fascination and unhappiness. Two years back, a train connecting Bamako to Kayes gave its last breath to the colonial structure. It took 18 hours and 30 stops to reach the capital. However the finest hour in Malian train history was the Bamako-Dakar link by the Dakar Bamako Express (DBK), engraved in Roman letters on the station hall flooring. A service 1287 km long and which would cost in between 800 million and 3 billion to be relaunched.
There stays the structure inherited from the French colonial time and which seems, with its yellowed stone, its tin counters, its period lettering, its huge spaces under vaults and its yellowed paint, to be the ideal place for a time of observation. The Biennial’s exhibition is also skillfully scenographed, the cross-shaped picture rails offering the reading of 2 artists “back to back” against the background of the orange walls of the station.
The setup of Gherdai Hassell is a little wonder to observe. The Bermuda-born artist, who now lives in the UK, presents a diptych built around a leporello and a photographic work entitled What Remains To Be Seen (2021 ). On the wall, the photos intermingle and superimpose archival images of the African diaspora to recompose them into brand-new figures, which the artist calls “monuments. She blends faces, cultures, imaginaries, trajectories and histories as if to assert the power of a future formed from past traditions. The book-accordion (leporello) plays on the same pink and ochre camping tents and seems to weave between each page a more dreamlike narrative of this vision.
Anique Jordan is another figure to bear in mind in this 2nd exhibit. Her series “Salt” forms a memorial expedition of her own household history on the island of Trinidad and Tobago. She commemorates in several frozen, rather remote pictures, the very same female worn the traditional white gown of the island in front of everyday things: substantial iron pots, fish stalls, in the kitchen area or on the stoop of a house. The frozen, practically missing posture of the design recalls stereotypical colonial imagery– noticeable and brilliantly dismantled in the current exhibition Colonial Decadence at the Centre Pompidou.
Anique Jordan’s stagings agitate the eye. The woman can not be missed out on, even if her presence remains ghostly. Her figure forms a tipping point in between a still life and a genre scene, both difficult. Above all, she mentions the permanence of stories, memories and liabilities and the requirement for the artist to take them in order to live.
The Bamako Encounters 2022 Train station Bamako https://www.rencontres-bamako.org