The luminous continent: the revelatory power of images—whether from high-art sources or elsewhere—marked the most recent biennial of African photography in Bamako

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Richard Vine

Many of the best elements of the Rencontres came together at the Palais in the work of U.S.-based Fatimah Tuggar, an internationally exhibited artist originally from Nigeria. So insidiously humorous and mordant are her cross-cultural computer montages--e.g., an African family sitting in a WASPish living room before a double portrait of the Cleavers from "Leave It to Beaver"--that the biennial judges unanimously awarded Tuggar a newly created special jury prize. Combining technical deftness with social conscience, her work reveals a psychological dilemma inherent in the Rencontres and the globalization it portends--a deep ambivalence over the intrusion of modernism into ethnic life-worlds and the subsequent entry of Third World people into Western enclaves and social groups.

At the Memorial Modibo Keita, a new single-story structure with a walled garden that attracts a steady stream of beautifully attired wedding parties, a dozen Cuban artists--the relatively straight documentarians like Cristobal Herrera Ulashkevich more persuasive than the tardy quasi-surrealists like Juan Carlos Alom Jimenez--were inadvertently overshadowed by 72-year-old Zimbabwean photographer John Mauluka. Encompassing work of remarkably uneven conceptual quality (right down to banal shots of charming street urchins), Mauluka's monographic show nonetheless contained numerous galvanizing, once-seen-never-forgotten images: big-bottomed women dancing in the street to celebrate a sudden change in political fortunes; a professor standing with his pants pulled down as a security officer conducts a broad-daylight body search on a busy street in Harare.

Controversy of a different sort pervaded the Fondation Seydou Keita, where a career-spanning selection of the artist's works opened to the accompaniment of animal-costumed dancers performing in the street and, indoors, brilliantly dressed impersonators ready to duplicate the poses from some of Keita's best-known compositions. In the corner of a sMali office sat a trunk that holds most of the 7,000 extant Keita negatives--minus 921 that remain (illegally, according to the family-based Seydou Keita Association) in the hands of Andre Magnin, curator for Jean Pigozzi's Contemporary African Art Collection in Geneva, which--ironically--supplied the 10 exquisite prints shown at the Musee National [see "Front Page," Dec. '03]. In a back room, Djonda Akpehou, a young artist from Togo, enacted a silent mourning ceremony as he knelt surrounded by Keita's equipment.

Around town, a handful of ancillary exhibitions sought to win over the local public through easy physical access, inviting subject matter and respect for workaday Malian photographers. These shows included Belgian artist Sebastian Schutyser's supersize prints on canvas that inventory mud-brick mosques in Mali, most of them much more remote and neglected than the famous masterwork in Djenne; portraits of musicians displayed both indoors and out (despite blazing sunlight) at the Agence Malienne de Presse; studies of elaborate hairdressing patterns and procedures by five interns of the Centre Photographique Helvetas; views of African ports by nine artists at the Musee du District; and a group show of African photographers at Bamako's only international-quality commercial venue, Galerie Chab.