Joana Choumali Ivory Coast
Biography
-
M. Muebi Adeniy, 2014
-
M. Salbre, 2014
-
M. Salbre D, 2014
-
Mme Christine S, 2014
-
Mme Christine S D, 2014
-
Mme Odile D, 2014
-
Mme Odile,, 2014
-
Mrs Benin D, 2014
-
Mrs Djeneba, 2014
-
Mrs Djeneba D, 2014
-
Mrs Martine, 2014
-
Ca Va Aller 12
Joana Choumali was born in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s economic capital and West Africa’s most populous French-speaking city where she currently lives and works. She studied Graphic Arts in Casablanca (Morocco) before embarking on her photographic career.
Choumali works mainly with photography, sometimes using it with mixed media. Her practice documents changes in urban West Africa that affect social, psychological and cultural constructs. Mostly through portraiture she conveys the personal however shared narratives of her sitters with a delicate but powerful touch that has gathered the international photographic world’s attention. She has been addressing contemporary taboos such as hostility to intra-African immigration, (Hââbré; 2014), the ambivalence of young urban professional women versus traditional images of femininity (Resilients, 2015) or social masquerade (Persona, the Social Mask, 2016).
The new series ‘Ca va aller’ is being presented presently at Bamako photographic Encounters 2017 as well as by 50 Golborne. It was photographed in the coastal small town of Grand Bassam- a beach place that for many people from Abidjan represents a refuge from the city- that was the site of an unexpected and violent terrorist attack in March 2016. At a period where she herself was facing health issues, Joana Choumali took time off there, taking photographs of people she would encounter on her way; for the first time in her practice, they were not aware they would be snapped up. Beyond the serene and quaint surroundings of the beach town, she became aware of people’s bubbles of loneliness and mental entrapments. At the same time, she resumed a childhood habit of embroidery which she found healing; She decided to print the Grand Bassam pictures on canvas of 24cm x 24cm which she would take with her everywhere and onto which she begun to stitch added motifs.
The series Ca va aller question the traumas that the terrorist attack created in a number of people in the town of Grand Bassam which were made more acute added to not- dealt- with traumatic memories of the short but deadly civil war that the country went through in the 2010s. The artist physically underlines with her thread how mental pain is generally still taboo in West Africa and how psychological and psychiatric help is still unavailable.
Johana Choumali is a Grand Winner of Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, 2016; winner of the LensCulture Emerging Talents Awards, and the POPCAP’14 Piclet.org Prize Africa, both in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Civilizations, the Donwahi Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Rotunda of the Arts, and the Eureka Gallery, the Photoquai Biennale, at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, at the Paris Also Known As Africa Fair, at the Rush Art Gallery in New York, at 50 Golborne gallery in London, at the Biennale Bamako, at the LagosPhoto Festival, at the African Film Festival in Lausanne.
She has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, CNN, El Pais (Spain), Le Monde, The Guardian, Forbes Magazine, The Huffington Post, Marie Claire Magazine Australia, Elle South Africa, Geo Magazine, Le Temps (Switzerland), La Stampa, The Internazionale (Italy) etc.
Works
Art Fairs
