Joana Choumali photo. ©Abbas Makke 2020
Choumali (1974), a visual artist and photographer born and based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (formerly called the Ivory Coast), will use the fellowship to create Yougou-Yougou (Secondhand Clothing), a photographic and mixed-media project exploring how imported western clothing affects community identity and exposes inequalities created by colonial legacies, transnational trade, and global power relations.
The thirteenth recipient of the fellowship, Joana Choumali, studied graphic arts in Casablanca, Morocco, and worked as an art director in an advertising agency before embarking on a photographic career. Her work focuses on the “innumerable cultures” of the African continent. She works mainly on conceptual portraits, documentary photography, and mixed media, most recently embroidering directly on photographic images with what she calls, “a slow and meditative gesture.” “Joana Choumali’s works extend the boundaries of photography into exciting new territory,” said Peabody Museum Curator of Visual Anthropology Ilisa Barbash. “Choumali starts with a traditionally flat medium and then layers thread and fabric to add dimension, texture, color, and new meaning. What begins as an instantaneous image produced by the technology of digital photography becomes enriched, politicized, and transformed by Joana’s beautiful and painstaking hand-sewing.”
Choumali plans to ground her Gardner Fellowship project, Yougou-Yougou, in an “anthropology of clothing.” She will look specifically at what happens when western “fast fashion”—secondhand clothes, and message T-shirts—is imported to African consumers, many from less affluent classes. “My aim is to demonstrate that through this clothing our Ivorian community (more precisely, the dynamic youth) generally appropriates culture, incorporating styles and messages into their self-presentation, imagination, and social practices.” Choumali will investigate the sociopolitical implications of this in Côte d'Ivoire, and possibly adjacent countries.
In November 2019, Choumali was the first African recipient of the Eighth Prix Pictet for her series ça va aller (it will be okay) on that year’s theme of Hope. According to The Prix Pictet website, the chair of the 2019 jury, Sir David King, declared, “In an extremely strong field, [Choumali’s] work stood out as a brilliantly original meditation on the ability of the human spirit to wrest hope and resilience from even the most traumatic events.” Ça va aller was Choumali’s response to March 2016 terrorist attacks at Grand Bassam, a small holiday town near Abjidjan. “To me, Bassam was a synonym of happiness, until that day. Three weeks after the attacks, a kind of melancholy invaded the town. I decided to wander the silent, empty streets and shoot with my iPhone. Most of the pictures show empty places, people by themselves. Back home I felt the need to process this pain and I discovered that I could do so through embroidery. Each stitch was a way to recover, to lay down the emotions, the loneliness, and mixed feelings I had. As an automatic scripture, the act of adding colorful stitches on the pictures has had a soothing effect on me, like a meditation. Adding embroidery on these street photographs was an act of channeling hope and resilience.”
Read the article on https://peabody.harvard.edu/joana-choumali
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