The Ivorian artist’s work is one of the highlights at this year’s international photo festival.
Accra based Gallery 1957 will run a solo booth by the award-winning Ivorian photographer and mixed media artist Joana Choumali at Unseen, Amsterdam. Presenting new work from her Alba’hian series, Choumali will also participate in Unseen Amsterdam’s curated section Woven Matters – a group exhibition that explores the use of textiles in photography. Woven Matters sees a duo presenation from Choumali and Zohra Opoku where the two artists’s work connect to their personal histories as well as a larger conceptualisation of the African diaspora through the use of textiles.
In the series Alba’hian – meaning ‘the first light of day’ in the Agni language of the Akan group in Côte d’Ivoire – the artist mediates on the cityscape during the time and processes of dawn. With photographs of Abidjan, Accra and Dakar, Choumali intimately surveys the land around her, observing landscapes, the shapes of buildings and object that slowly reveal themselves in the early hours of the morning.
Choumali has participated in exhibitions in Marrakech, Basel, Cape Town, Venice and Lagos amongst other cities.
Her book HAABRE was published by Fourthwall Books in 2016, Johannesburg.
More about Choumali and Gallery 1957 here.
