Mali. Art between History and Myth

The Look (2014) by Zoumana Doumbia

The physical geography of Mali is more varied than its desert mass let predict. The human landscape with its architecture is bluntly extraordinary, having made by the earth before it becomes sand and water as precious as gold, the instruments of Djenné and Mopti’s architectures, Ségou and Timbuktu. This big textile culture has built its excellence on the basis of scarce raw materials. One of its many variants, the Bogolan, is based exclusively on the centrality of the clay and nothing else. The work by Kandiourou Koulibaly testifies this actuality by taking advantage, as in a minimal game, from the lack of means.

The Woman in Today’s World (2014) by Siaka Togola

If history runs and notoriously remains indifferent to the fate of his actors, art, that is less indifferent (at least by statute, if not in the reality of many contemporary trends), however it unleashes many considerations. Because the works for Imago Mundi Mali speak a polyphonic language. Some of them play a conceptual task and many others outline a reality in tension between History and Myth; other works, as in the case of Sambou Sissoko, speak a refined language and deliberately unpredictable (his strong point is however represented by video).

Emotion (2014) by Zoumana Sidibe

Of course we confirm the visual creativity of Mali, already well-known to anyone involved in contemporary African art. In addition to painting and a good standard sculpture, it should be emphasized the continuing centrality of photography, which has still an active world-renowned protagonists as Malick Sidibe, and has an ICF elite center directed by Sogodogo, outfitted with modern equipment and a print quality that has nothing to envy to the European Union (in this sense, in Africa, unfortunately remains an exception).

Metting of Ancestors (2014) by Modibo Doumbia

In the capital Bamako, which concentrates the vast majority of the arts and artists, two large public institutions of visual art are active and very well-attended, such as the Institut National des Arts (INA) and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia (CAMM). The first one is similar to the Italian Academies of Fine Arts and the second structure has ambitions more similar to those of an Anglo-Saxon university campus. The art scene in Bamako is therefore stimulating enough to have convinced a painter as important as the Beninese Ludovic Faidaro to spend much of his time there. Many young artists have gathered around him, and besides the mentioned institutions, there are other, private institutes that collect remarkable artists (in particular the Centre Soleil d’Afrique).

The Three Ladies of Africa (War, Famine and Disease) (2014) by Boubacar Maiga

So how can it be expressed in concrete works this profusion of institutes and centers of art that as a whole is among the most vibrant in Sub-Saharan Africa? Indeed in an abundance of languages even very different from each other, and not only in the number of techniques that we told above about the centrality of photography, already made famous by the works of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibe (the first one still belongs to the colonial period and that of Sidibe, reprinted specifically for Imago Mundi, is a masterpiece of contemporary portraiture). There is of course an excellent new generation of painters and the pictorial climate is vibrant and varied, counting aniconic languages and others iperfigurative, without the influence of Islam to favour the first, despite the vast majority of the population is Islamic, as elsewhere (and I particularly mean in Niger).

Demolition (2014) by Aboubacar Traore

It should be mentioned to those who know about African art, that since the immediate post-war period, in some of the most important centers in Sub-Saharan Africa as Kinshasa or Nairobi, but also in Bamako, there were active academies or institutions of fine arts guided by Western artists well acquainted with the historical avant-garde European languages. The languages of the avant-garde, and especially that of Picasso and the Cubists, and even more that of the Surrealists, will have some importance in the formation of contemporary African art (but without forgetting them) free from the tribal cultures that had been so successful in Europe starting from early 20th century. Basically Africa has regained, but not entirely, what it had already given.

Mali Braid A 45 (2014) by Youssouf Sogodogo

But the 140 works, or however many of them, do not omit the reality of conflict in Mali today, where a large part of the country (the properly Saharan Africa) is crossed by a fierce conflict and the outcome is still unpredictable. The explosion of Libya and the new leadership of the Tuareg militias armed by the Libyan arsenals, where they had already passed through as elite troops, did spark the occupation of the Saharan cities of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu (2012). Tuareg’s traditional nationalism combined itself (but also with conflicts) with a new (within the Tuareg) Salafi matrix Islamic fundamentalism, supported by several activists from various Arab countries and from Europe.

Henna (2014) by Maimouna Diawara

And will you imagine the soldiers in Kepi that they left only fifty years ago when they said they were civilizing a backward country and now are back only changing some terms of the same concept – but with an obvious loss of authority, including the military one and not only ideological? In the area of Gao and Kidal, and especially towards the great Adrar of Iforas, the old camel drivers of the Saharan salt route (in this activity the Iforas Tuareg were mainly known) shoot the neo occupants just as they did during most of the colonial period.