Joana Choumali

Robert Gardner Photography Fellow 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.

A portrait of Joana Choumali. She smiles at the lens.
Joana Choumali photo. ©Abbas Makke 2020

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.”

As Choumali’s frequent collaborator, sociologist Maria Anney explains, “During the pre-colonial and colonial eras, the regions of sub-Saharan Africa underwent massive extractions of their natural resources sent to the West, and at the same time their local markets were invaded by secondhand Western products, thus rendering Africans dependent on cheap and used imports. Many articles and social studies have produced some important data about this fact. The phenomenon of secondhand message T-shirts provokes many questions: Who buys these, and why? What is the influence of these messages on the social imagination of the communities who wear these secondhand clothes? How much room do consumers have to maneuver between the original message (which they may not—or even want to—understand) and their own political concerns? What does it mean to sell foreign ideologies in this way?”

Choumali’s mixed-media techniques, says Anney, “make visible the way in which social codes circulate through an object (the clothes) and an active body.” After photographing people wearing message Tshirts, Choumali says she will “manually intervene on the portraits by superimposing textiles, embroidery, and collage to create a relief effect.” “The freedom offered by this technique,” says Anney, allows Choumali to “reclaim the imposed message, inviting us to reflect on a new history or third life of these T-shirts.”

A mixed media image of three women with their backs to the observer. They look out over water to a city beyond. The women are surrounded by brightly colored foliage, which also encroaches around the edges of the foreground.
AS THE WIND WHISPERS, Sries ALBHIAN, 80 x80cm. ©Joana Choumali, 2019.

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.”

A portrait black man with a scarred face looks pensively to the right. He sits against a teal background, wearing a gridded white collared shirt.
MR. POUSNOUGA, Series HAABRE, THE LAST GENERATION. ©Joana Choumali, 2014.
A black woman with a scarred face looks pensively to the right, as if remembering something. She is in front of a teal background, wearing a golden yellow, leaf-patterned headwrap that matches her shirt.
MRS. DJENEBA, Series HAABRE, THE LAST GENERATION. ©Joana Choumali, 2014.
A black woman with a scarred face looks at the camera lens, as if trying to contain a laugh. She's against a teal background, wearing a striped earthy headwrap and bright teal checkered shirt that nearly matches the background.
MRS. MARTINE K, Series HAABRE, THE LAST GENERATION. ©Joana Choumali, 2014.

Choumali’s earlier works exhibit an equally bold but more traditional approach to photography. Among these is the book, Haabré: The Last Generation (Fourthwall Books, 2016), which contains a series of studio portraits of people who are among the last generation to “bear the ritual scarification associated with a number of ethnic groups in various parts of West Africa.” She combines these with interview excerpts from her sitters which reveal “a range of responses to scarification, from pride to ambivalence and even outright rejection of the facial markings.” As she explains on her website, “These portraits and texts examine the complex role of tradition in an urban setting such as Abidjan and suggest the shifting nature of the concepts of beauty and identity.”

Choumali has exhibited her work at the Museum of Civilizations (Abidjan); the Donwahi Foundation for Contemporary Art (Abidjan); the Rotonde des Arts Contemporary Art Center (Abidjan); the Vitra Design Museum (Basel); the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Marrakech); the Museum of Photography of Saint-Louis (Senegal); the Troppen Museum (Amsterdam); the International Photography Biennale of Bamako; the Photoquai Biennale (Quai Branly Museum (Paris); the Lagos Photo Festival; and PhotoVogue Festival.

In 2014, she won the CapPrize Award and the 2014 Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award. 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 Pavilion of the Ivory Coast during the 57th Venice International Biennale. Her latest mixed-media series, Alba’hian, was exhibited at the Zeitz Mocaa Museum of Contemporary Arts (Capetown). Her work has been published in the international press: CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Harper’s Bazaar Art, El Pais (Spain), Le Monde (France), Le Temps (Switzerland), La Stampa, The Internazionale (Italy), The Guardian, and The Financial Times (Great Britain).