AFRICAN PORTRAITS

Name: AFRICAN PORTRAITS
Start: 2023-02-18 00:00:00
End: 2023-06-11 00:00:00
Location: Warehouse of Ideas

Warehouse of Ideas

Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy

The show

From 18 February to 11 June 2023, the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste presents the exhibition African Portraits. Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso , edited by Filippo Maggia.

Now celebrated all over the world among the protagonists of photography of the last half century, the three artists have only been discovered in the West in recent years and their personal stories have contributed to making their works even more fascinating.

The exhibition, produced and organized by ERPAC - Regional Body for Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia, presents for the first time in Italy an important selection of more than one hundred works by the three photographers, made available by CAAC The Contemporary African Art Collection in Geneva, the Jean Marc Patras Gallery in Paris, the Modena Foundation for Visual Arts and numerous private lenders.

Seydou Keïta and Malik Sidibé were born into modest families and began their careers in small photographic studios in the capital of Mali, Bamako. Their fellow citizens parade in front of their lens, in crucial years for the history of the country and of Africa. With extraordinary skill, they immortalize not only an exceptional gallery of faces and figures, but above all they capture the aspirations, fashions, the evolution of a society that has changed rapidly since the 1950s both as a result of the regained political independence of Mali in 1960 , but also the desire of young Africans to keep pace with their European peers.

Of a generation following that of Keïta and Sidibé, Samuel Fosso picks up where the others left off. He too began his career in a small photographic studio without the ambition of being an artist, but his work, which alternates color between black and white, is not composed like that of Keïta and Sidibé of portraits of others. Fosso begins to portray himself almost as a game, and his work develops through self-portraits in which he ironically interprets the stereotypes of Africa seen through the eyes of the West or in which he reincarnates, starting with Malcolm X, the symbolic figures of emancipation of blacks.

The itinerary can be configured as a "relay", as the curator Filippo Maggia defines it, which allows you to cover a long period of African history. “Keïta – writes Maggia – was active in the years preceding Mali's independence (which took place in 1960), Sidibé lives and recounts the years immediately following independence, Fosso was born in the years in which various African countries achieved independence. A relay that we also find in the contents of their images, as if the narrative thread traced by Keïta at the end of the 1940s had then found its own evolutionary path that runs hand in hand with the progressive conquest and manifestation of a conscious 'Africanness', a sign distinctive feature that we read in their portraits, which not by chance become self-portraits in Fosso”.