By Lauren Kaufmann
This show is proof of the Harvard Art Museums’ commitment to display relevant work by living artists who are grappling with critical issues posed by our contemporary world.
Joana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces, on view at the Harvard Art Museums through May 11
Walking into Joana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces, a new exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, you’re surrounded by portraits of vendors at a marketplace. But these are not conventional photographs attached to the wall. Choumali has printed the portraits onto fabric, embroidered and quilted them, backing them with batting so that each image becomes three-dimensional. She has sewn trails of colored embroidery thread to the bottom of each creation, allowing them to sway. These life-sized portraits hang at eye level, creating the sense that you are among the vendors in their milieu — the West African marketplace.
Choumali, born and currently living in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, was named the Robert Gardner Photography Fellow in 2020, awarded to her by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Despite the interruption of the pandemic, she has used the fellowship to focus on Yougou-Yougou, a local phrase for secondhand clothing, as the basis for a photographic and mixed media project exploring issues regarding transnational trade and global power dynamics.
The most striking feature of Choumali’s portraits is the English phrase stamped on front of the vendors’ T-shirts. One young woman wears a tank top that reads “Normal People Scare Me,” while another sports a bright yellow T-shirt that says “Touch Me and Your First Boxing Lesson Is Free.” The slogan on a young man’s shirt says, “I’m a Man. I Have Needs,” while another man’s T-shirt reads, “All the Feels.”
While some of the phrases are humorous, others are suggestive or completely nonsensical. The incongruous relationship between the vendors and their T-shirts is heightened by the fact that none of them speak English. The meaning of their shirts is lost on them. Choumali interviews each of her subjects, and when she explains the meaning of the slogan on their T-shirts, some are amused, while others are nonplussed.
Despite the insignificance of the slogans on the shirts, Choumali imbues the images with renewed meaning by embellishing them with stitchery, adding layers of fabric to build up a quilted image. She scans the photographs of her subjects and makes digital composites, so that each portrait is actually an amalgam of several images. In a statement released by the Peabody Museum, Choumali says, “As an automatic scripture, the act of adding colorful stitches on the pictures has had a soothing effect on me, like meditation. Adding embroidery on these street photographs was an act of channeling hope and resilience.”
The marketplace vendors wear the T-shirts as a kind of work uniform, so, unlike most Americans, they are not donning them to express personal views. The vendors buy the shirts for a few dollars and appropriate them in a utilitarian fashion. In fact, several of the vendors note that when they go out at night, they wear traditional garb. So, the question arises: why do the marketplace vendors choose to wear English-language T-shirts to work?
The answer is complicated. When clothing made for the American and European markets reaches its shelf life, it gets packed up in bales and shipped off to port cities in West Africa and South America. English has become the world’s primary language, so it appears everywhere, including on our clothing. Fast-fashion is cheap to produce and affordable to purchase. T-shirts with slogans are highly disposable because they bear no meaning to their users. However, as the text notes, the overabundance of cheap clothing becomes an environmental problem when it ends up being burned, tossed into dumpsites, or, worse, dumped into the ocean.
The role of the West African marketplace is central to the exhibition. These are lively places where vendors sell goods from all over the continent, along with imported items. Everything from food and medicinal plants to cookware and other domestic goods is for sale. Nothing has a fixed price, so bargaining is the name of the game. The marketplace offers a place for locals to socialize and exchange information, becoming an ad hoc community for vendors and residents alike.
Choumali’s Kantamanto Market, a mural of one of the largest marketplaces, is a colorful pastiche of images taken at the marketplace in Accra, Ghana. The marketplace is situated on about 20,000 acres and is run by about 30,000 people. Choumali stitched together and embroidered several photographs to create this work. In the bottom left-hand corner sit numerous bales of clothing, ready to be sold to local customers. In the center of the image, a woman carries a large package on her head. There is the sense of being surrounded by endless consumables, and maybe that’s the point of today’s marketplaces, and of this exhibition.
We’re all deluged by things, and much of it has little, or no, meaning to us. Despite Marie Kondo’s best efforts to help us declutter, we still love our stuff. What’s troubling is that so many of our undesirable things end up in African marketplaces. But what’s fascinating is that they’re not valued there either. The vendors who wear the T-shirts know that they’re worthless, which is why they wear them to work and then dispose of them. When we export our useless things, we also implicitly pass along our attitudes toward this stuff, which circulates in a perpetual orbit around the globe.
The exhibition offers a lot to chew on — the global exchange of superfluous merchandise and the sharing of values associated with all this useless product. Also of concern is the conundrum of how to get rid of all our unwanted things. You can’t help but feel disturbed by the notion that there seems to be no end to the stuff, and no safe way to dispose of it.
The artwork and ideas expressed in this exhibition are thought-provoking, illuminating a facet of everyday life in West Africa that many of us are unaware of. Fortunately, the Harvard Art Museums have become an increasingly accessible place. In June 2023, the university announced that admission would be free at all times. This decision opens the institution to all, from the residents of the Greater Boston community to tourists looking for an affordable museum experience. On a recent Saturday, the place was buzzing with families, students, and people of various ages.
Although the Harvard Art Museums are an academic institution, where research and teaching take center stage, there’s a renewed vigor in the institution’s offerings. This show is proof of the museum’s commitment to display relevant work by living artists who are grappling with critical issues posed by our contemporary world.
Lauren Kaufmann has worked in the museum field for the past 14 years and has curated a number of exhibitions. She served as guest curator for Moving Water: From Ancient Innovations to Modern Challenges, currently on view at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Boston.
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Tagged: "Joana Choumali: Languages of West Africa" Harvard-Art-Museums, Kantamanto Market, the West African marketplace
