Joana Choumali, born in 1974, is a visual artist/photographer based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She studied graphic arts in Casablanca (Morocco) and worked as an artistic director in an advertising agency before embarking on a career as a photographer. She works mainly on conceptual portraiture, mixed media and documentary photography. Much of her work focuses on what she learns about the countless cultures around her.
In her latest works, Joana Choumali embroiders directly on the images completing the act of creating the photographic image with a slow and meditative gesture. In 2014, she won the Cap Prize Award and the Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award 2014. In 2016, she received the Magnum Emergency Grant Foundation and the Fourthwall Books Award in South Africa. In 2017, she exhibited her series "Translation" and "Adorn" at the Ivory Coast Pavilion during the 57th Venice International Biennale. On November 13, 2019, she became the first African winner of the Prix Pictet for her series "Ça va aller" on the theme of this cycle, "Hope". His work has been published in the international press: CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, El Pais, Le Monde, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Harper Bazaar Art, The Financial Times etc. Her book HAABRE, was published and edited in Johannesburg in 2016. Her book "Ça va aller" was published in 2022 by Nazraeli press, USA
She was named a 2020 Robert Gardner Fellow in photography by the Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnology, at Harvard University in the United States.
Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum (MET) in New York, the High Museum, Contemporary Art in Atlanta, the Harvard Art Museum in Boston In the United States ; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London ; the Prix Pictet Collection in Switzerland ; the Carla and Pieter Schulting Collection in Pais Bottom ; the Collection of the Fondation H in Paris and Antananarivo ; the MACAAL Museum of Contemporary African Art in Al Maaden in Marrakech ; the Museum of Photography in St Louis Senegal ; Harry David Art Collection in Greece ; the Leridon Collection, in Paris and the Tiroche Deleon Collection, in Israel.
Série ALBA'HIAN, Joana Choumali
"Alba'hian" in Agni (the language of the Akan group in Côte d'Ivoire), means "the first light of the day", "the dawn".
For over a year now, every morning, Joana Choumali has woken up at 5am, and walked, for long stretches of time. She begins each new day by getting in touch with the land around her, observing the landscapes, the buildings, the shapes slowly revealing themselves — the streets and their people awakening, starting a new day at the sound of joyful, noisy birds.
What started as physical training for a trekking in Asia, gradually became a daily routine, a ritual of introspection, which has accompanied Choumali ever since, even when she travels in other countries, especially Africa. As the morning light at the beginning of each new day slowly makes every detail of the material world visible, so this practice of observation has made Choumali become aware of the shift in her thoughts and her perception of realities. She witnesses the energy of the continent which keeps its people going and shapes their lilives—andurther, the changes in herself.
Choumali has taken to the habit of photographing the landscapes which amaze her every morning, rigorously between the hours of 5 and 7am. Afterwards, using a mixed technique of collage, embroidery, quilting and photomontage, she superimposes onto them several layers of ethereal fabrics, intertwined with other photographs she takes during those walks — silhouettes of passers-by or street imagery.
The results are like delicate and dreamy toiles, evoking the invisible meanings and revelations of the artist's morning experiences: the separation of, and at the same time the relationship between, the real world and the world of the imagination. We could say that Choumali's work is made of the same substance which memories and dreams are made of: impalpable and barely perceptible images that overlap one another, and mix with memories and experience from times gone by and more recent thoughts and sensations.
It is now the belief of cognitive science, that the mechanisms of our memory operate through a stratified system of different levels of awareness and consciousness: the subconscious draws on the reality of our daily experience, and uses fragments of perceptions to make sense of all the memories and feelings accumulated at the various levels of consciousness. With the intuitive power typical of the artist, Choumali creates reproductions of her memories and sensations. The long hours she spends sewing together the different layers, and embroidering her motifs and drawings onto the fabrics, have become moments of meditation; another ritual by which she is able to observe herself changing through this process, to examine her emotions and reactions, and reshape them in a different, clearer way.
The morning light has a symbolic value of rediscovery and illumination in almost every culture. It is the vital energy that is born again, renovating any new day; it is the hope of a new beginning. This work is a journey into Choumali's own inner life, into the core of her being. It is an act of courage, of total acceptance of the woman she has discovered within herself: it is her fears, her desires, her joys and sorrows, that she transforms into golden lines, enriched patterns, beautifully coloured and poetic objects — all which express her joy of being alive.
What Choumali creates is not immediately visible in its entirety. As in her morning walks, the beauty and the complexity of all parts of the artworks are visible to the viewer only after a process of discovery of all the details layered through the different strata. The exploration of each piece recalls the unveiling of a precious hidden treasure, a process also similar to Choumali's developing relationship with her own land — the place where she always feels the most alive, surrounded everywhere by poetry, constantly regenerating energy and beauty. Gradually, Choumali has understood that what she was hoping to find in her journeys abroad, she finally discovered in her own "home".
Maria Pia Bernardoni