Bamako Encounters photography festival pulsates with revolutionary spirit

Inside the elegant, disused Bamako Railway Station, a pan-African artists’ collective is sitting on a carpet in the middle of an installation. Some members are braiding their hair while others spin records on a turntable. They’ve created an archive of African material culture titled the Haptic Library, with vintage Arab pop tapes, feminist books and an Amazigh loom.

On the walls are some of the 75 artists featured at the 13th edition of Bamako Encounters — African Biennale of Photography. Although here in Bamako you get the sense of a city functioning in its usual noisy, dusty, visually arresting way, it is a minor miracle the biennale has gone ahead, given Mali’s 11-year-long north-south conflict, a 2021 military coup and international trade sanctions. Outside of Bamako the UK Foreign Office advises against all travel.

As textile designer Zineb Achoubie, born in Casablanca and working in the Atlas Mountains, invites viewers to weave the Amazigh symbols her grandmother once wore as face tattoos, she says this kind of cross-cultural library challenges the structures of colonial archives — which categorised people and things according to a western European mindset — and instead “re-archives” objects in non-hegemonic ways.

This decolonising spirit pulsates through the biennale, as does a rich diasporic flavour. With a curatorial theme exploring multiplicity and difference in African heritage, Bamako Encounters is both transcontinental and transglobal. As Lorna Bennett’s early-1970s reggae classic “Letter From Miami” echoes around the ticket hall where passengers once used the Dakar-Niger railway, the music and images converse across generational and geographic space.

In this venue (one of eight), Moroccan photographer Seif Kousmate captures the aesthetics of a rebuilt Rwanda. Schoolchildren in gold costumes, colour-coordinated bridesmaids outside Kigali’s Radisson Blu hotel, the meeting of Rwanda’s new young hopes and its bright capitalist dream. Kousmate spent three months immersed there learning about the 1994 genocide and its place in the collective memory. The transnationalism continues at the National Museum of Mali with South African Atiyyah Khan’s “Bismillah”, a lovingly compiled zine of record sleeves from Gabon, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Guinea, Somalia and beyond, paired with a rich sound archive of Islamic and folk music.

Many of the exhibited artists live outside the continent, several in Berlin, where artistic director Bonaventure Ndikung is based. Sudanese artist Salih Basheer, living in self-imposed exile in Denmark, presents a mournful stillness in his depictions of the loneliness that migration brings. Bloodstains on white cloth, the only colour in black and white shots, reference the 2005 massacre of Sudanese refugees by Egyptian security forces at a protest in Cairo.

In contrast, Berlin-based Muhammad Salah’s “Between the Niles” shows images of his home, Sudan. But they are not a celebration. A mounted soldier poses from a horse. “It’s the duality of light and darkness, birth and death, love and hate,” Salah says. “I spent 27 years in a militarised space. I saw people I know die in the streets. My work is about the difficult passing of time.”

Among the diasporic artists, the passage of time is also preserved. Brooklyn-born Adama Delphine Fawundu, whose origins are in Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, and Nene Aïssatou Diallo, who was born in Guinea and moved to New Jersey as a child, both use print fabrics that once belonged to their mothers and grandmothers. Their work transports their African heritage to non-African settings through the medium of their own families.

British-Jamaican artist Joy Gregory’s “Seeds of Empire” studies much older histories. Set to a score by South African composer Phillip Miller — his reworking of a song played by enslaved African people on Jamaica’s plantations — Gregory’s two films show her austerely dressed as Rose, a real 17th-century servant of a slave-owner in Jamaica. Journal entries on screen from the Anglo-Irish naturalist Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the Islands speak matter-of-factly of the weather he experienced during his 1687-89 trip to the Caribbean — breezes, rains, hot nights, earthquakes — and of the herbal remedies he tested on Rose as a scientific experiment. Meanwhile, voices of Jamaicans who emigrated to the UK from the 1950s onwards speak of their encounters with British weather — “black ice, white snow, smog” — over images of lush Jamaican vegetation

Sloane collected plant specimens that were part of the Natural History Museum’s foundation in London, while African people brought seeds across the Atlantic as objects of power. “Plants were more valuable than money and gold,” Gregory says. “The more you knew about plants the more powerful you were.” Her work delivers tales of oppression with such tranquillity that it could be a metaphor for slavery — the overwhelming violence inflicted while those horrors remained invisible in England except in the plant extracts produced by that violence, sugar to sweeten tea.

The pinnacle of the biennale is Baff Akoto’s “Leave the Edges” — a beautifully wrought exploration of how diasporic African culture is formed — which won the jury’s Seydou Keita Grand Prize. A 39-minute film installation at the charming Bamako District Museum, it opens in the dark of night with the shadowy splendour of reflected light on rippling water. Entranced figures dance and beat their hands on the water’s edge — whether in grief or reverence is unstated — creating a gentle, insistent rhythm and a sonic mystique. “The symbol of the ocean as the medium through which culture travels and evolves, following mercantile routes, is timeless,” Akoto says.

Before dawn arrives on this shimmering idyll, we see interspersed shots of urban domesticity, otherworldly carnival scenes, then a conch-shell is blown and we are teleported to a tropical glade where a solitary female figure is robed in maroon — flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves, whose work explores flamenco’s African origins. Shot in Guadeloupe, Seville, Paris and Berlin, “Leave the Edges” is a wonderfully choreographed study of the plurality of heritage and the African legacies unacknowledged within European culture. In an age of resurgent black art and expression, Akoto’s is a pristine rendering of the genre.

In the city where Malick Sidibé’s portraits birthed a renaissance in African photography, it is apt that portraiture is a recurrent mode. Local artist Fatoumata Diabaté mobilises Sidibe’s legacy with a studio on wheels — a reappropriated bus driven round Bamako by the Malian Women Photographers Association.

With self-portraiture democratised in an age of selfies, artists using the medium employ inventive ways to keep it interesting. In Sofia Yala’s series The Body as an Archive, she turns away from the camera and superimposes over herself scans of her grandfather’s official documents from Portuguese-ruled Angola. Maite Moseka Botembe is a ghostly apparition in her series on the resilience of Congolese women. Sethembile Msezane is regally dressed in South African landscapes that carry bloody histories. And Sana Ginwalla, an Indian-Zambian artist, presents a trove of decades-old portraits she found discarded in a Lusaka photo studio, capturing rarely seen multiplicities of everyday African people and evoking nostalgia in their unknown stories.

While the work at Bamako Encounters is often excellent, the scenography isn’t. Faulty projectors and missing signage are among the issues. Another criticism is lack of acknowledgment of the Sahel conflict, while historic conflicts elsewhere are abundantly referenced. But, given the battles raging beyond the capital and battles fought by the arts sector for funding, this biennale is a remarkable achievement.

To February 8, rencontres-bamako.org