The Ministry of Culture, Mali and the Institut français announce the 10th Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography—Telling Time, which explores the complex and multifaceted relationship between images and time.

Inspired by both Mali’s rich cultural traditions of storytelling and the nation’s recent political upheavals, the forthcoming edition questions the methods by which artists narrate real and imagined experiences through different economies of time. In chronicling how artists address the unpredictable relationship between political action, social realities, and aesthetic experience,Telling Time offers a multiplicity of perspectives from which to assess the biennale’s enduring role as an international convener of lens-based practices in Africa.

Historically, photographic images have been routinely interpreted as refractions of time and space relations, serving to advance visual arguments about the particularities of a given reality. Within this context Telling Time presents a nuanced array of lens-based projects that differently upend and reframe conventional interpretations of time through discrete structures of past, present, and future. The artists assembled use photography, film, video and animation to construct perspectives on time that are fragmented, disjunctive, or recursive in nature, offering alternative methods of engaging histories, experiences, and desires. While artists such as Malala Andrialavidrazana, Seydou Camara, and George Mahashe use archives and material traces to interrogate cultural traditions, the Collectif Perinium, George Senga, Aboubacar Traoré and Mudi Yahaya deploy strategies of reenactment and fabulation to reimagine histories and possible futures.

The concept of time in Africa has been the subject of popular and philosophical debates concerning political and technological belatedness, questions of colonial temporalities characterised by their links with the rise of capitalism, as well as the interventions made by liberation movements in radically deconstructing colonial time through projects of freedom, independence, and the development of civic identity. Yet the selected artists position these debates and histories as incomplete and ongoing, producing topical analyses of recent sociopolitical change as foregrounded in the photographic investigations of conflict by Jean-Euloge Samba and Hippolyte Sama, or through thematic studies of built environments found in the work of Helga Kohl, Salif Traore, Filipe Branquinho, and Simon Gush.

In addition to presenting a pan-African exhibition consisting of thirty-nine selected artists from an international call, the biennale will also comprise several monographic and thematic exhibitions that open up the discursive possibilities around the notion of time including projects dedicated to honouring the 10th anniversary of the biennale, a focus on Lusophone lens-based practices, and a programme of artists presentation, book launches and panels discussions.

The Bamako Encounters are organized with the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Crafts  in Mali in collaboration with the Institut français.

Executive Director: Samuel Sidibe

Artistic Director: Bisi Silva

Associate Curators: Antawan I. Byrd (Publications and Special Projects) and Yves Chatap (Exhibitions and Special Projects)

Artists: Hela Ammar, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Ismaïl Bahri, Steeve Bauras, Filipe Branquinho, Seydou Camara, Bakary Emmanuel Daou, Bakary Diallo, Khalfa Besma Djemila, Em’Kal Eyongakpa, Mounir Fatmi, Coco Fusco, Simon Gush, Uche Okpa Iroha, Moussa Kalapo, Lebohang Kganye, Helga Kohl, Youcef Krache, Youssef Lahrichi, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, George Mahashe, Randa Maroufi, Monica de Miranda, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Lucia Nhamo, Asia Nyembo, Groupe Périnium, The Otolith Group, Nyani Quarmyne, Nassim Rouchiche, Sihem Salhi, Hyppolyte Sama, Jean Euloge Samba, Nomwindé Vivien Sawadogo, Thabiso Sekgala, George Senga, Ibrahima Thiam, Aboubacar Traore, Salif Traore and Mudi Yahaya.

Opening and professional week: 31 October–4 November

About The Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography (Rencontres de Bamako)
Founded in 1994, the Bamako Encounters are collaboratively produced and organised by Mali’s Ministry of Culture and the Institut français, Paris. The biennale is the first and principal international platform dedicated to African photography and lens-based media on the continent. In its aim to promote and assess photography-based practices from local and international perspectives, the Bamako Encounters operates as a platform for presenting artwork and cultivating professional relationships among artists, curators, art historians, collectors, and the public more broadly. In addition to its emphasis on engaging local cultural centres, galleries, foundations, and schools, the biennale routinely collaborates with international foundations and cultural organisations to position Bamako as an important site for analysing and sharing recent developments in lens-based media.

www.rencontres-bamako.com