Portrait Africa
Photographs from three decades

Exhibition:
November 23 to Dezember 22, 2000
(photogalerie 94)

Opening:
Thursday, November 23, 2000, 6.30pm

Finissage:
Friday, Dezember 22, 2 - 6pm

Portrait Africa
A co-production of the Städtische Galerie im Amtshimmel Baden and Photogalerie 94 (initiator)

In collaboration with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, with the participation of Interkulturelle Projekte - Sammlung Peter Stepan, Courtesy Dany Keller Galerie, Munich, and Galerie Mai Ollivier, Paris; Sterk Lichtspieltheater AG, Baden; Trigon Film, Wettingen

Who isn't familiar with the famous photographs of Africa taken by European and American photographers? In the pre-television era, their photo reports in major magazines and newspaper supplements opened up the unknown continent to a broad public with images and reports. But how do African photographers see Africa and its people? After looking at it from the outside, we are increasingly interested in looking at it from the inside. At the beginning of 2000, the House of Cultures in Berlin organized a broad exhibition of African portrait photography, part of which has now left Berlin as a traveling exhibition—we are showing it for the first time in Switzerland. On display are portrait works by Samuel Fosso, Seydou Keita, Adama Kouyaté, Abdourahmane Sakaly and Malick Sidibé.
The selection of the five (now internationally renowned) photographers was made by the House of Cultures in Berlin. The portraits are exclusively black and white, spanning the period from the 1950s to the present day. There are good reasons why the exhibition begins in the early 1950s: it was during these years, before the independence of many African states, that the actual tradition of African photography, especially portrait photography, began. In the decades before that, it was primarily European photographers who were active in Africa. The genre of African portrait photography is European in character; African art had previously hardly known the individual portrait, in contrast to European art history.
Seydou Keita (born 1923) is considered the doyen of Malian portrait photographers; his photographs are mostly staged with carefully selected accessories and lavishly ornamental backgrounds.
The studio photographs of Adama Kouyaté and Abdourahmane Sakaly are characterized by their focus on the person and the faces. Kouyaté (born in 1928, worked in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Mali), Sakaly (1926-1988, born in Senegal, worked mainly in Mali).
The streets and, above all, the parties in the clubs of the 1950s and 1960s in Bamako (Mali) are the setting for the photographs of Malick Sidibé (born 1936).
Alongside these four representatives of classic portrait photography, the self-staging of Samuel Fosso, born in Cameroon in 1962 and now working in the Central African Republic, has an international and contemporary feel and can be easily interpreted in the context of contemporary art.
The exhibition Portrait Africa and the accompanying events are intended to be characterized by a spirit of commonality among cultures. The focus is not on differences and distinctions, but rather on the overarching commonalities of human coexistence, diversity in unity, and unity in diversity as the overarching design principle.