Maa Ka Maaya Ka Ca A Yere Kono – 13th Edition of the Rencontres de Bamako - African Biennale of Photography

Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus.

Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.

The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.

Contributions by Heba Y. Amin, Talal Afifi, Eiman Hussein, Tamer El Said, Stefanie Schulte, Strathaus, Haytham El Wardany, Julie Ault, Kader Attia, Roger M. Buergel, Sophia Prinz, Yael Bartana, Rosi Braidotti, Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Octavian Esanu, Megan Hoetger, Carlos Kong, Iman Issa, Kayfa ta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Doreen Mende, Stefan Nowotny, Marion von Osten, pad.ma, Abdias Nascimento, Eran Schaerf, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Françoise Vergès.

A complete documentation on a multimedia exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ixmucané Aguila, giving voice to voiceless descendants of victims of genocide in Namibia.

Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matter—its history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright. In the artistic documentary Fraitaxtsēs sores tsîn ge ra≠gâ – Ondjembo yo Null Vier, Ixmucané Aguilar has worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under Imperial Germany's violent occupation.
From these personal encounters emerge portraits, visuals and narratives as documental fragments, consisting of living voices which insist on defending memory as an invocation to witness and never to remain passive in the face of social injustice. Rather than a linear collection of data referring to distant places and its distant past, this work engages with stories as chronicles calling to be recognised as pieces of humanity and time.

Alongside Aguilar's portraits, this publication also contains contributions by human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck and the curator of the work Tristan Pranyko, along with poetry by Namibian artists Nesindano Namises, Fritz Isak Dirkse and Prince Kamaazegi, and narratives, testimonies, chants and mourning rituals shared by OvaHerero and Nama people in present-day Namiba.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, in 2023

Ixmucané Aguilar (born 1983) is a Guatemalan Berlin-based visual artist/designer who, through multi-layered documentary photography, engages in extensive field research to put out installations and art publications to relay her work in an artistic language.

Mud … and the Earth System explores groundbreaking research in Earth system sciences and highlights the challenges of communicating these findings to the public.

As once-stable “mudscapes” transform, they become both symptoms and symbols of a rapidly warming planet. This book delves into humanity’s connection to these changes through the study of ancient organic and inorganic compounds that have come alive after millennia. It poses essential questions about what these evolving ‘mud’ compounds reveal about Earth’s deep past and our imminent future.

Born from collaborative research led by artist Rikke Luther at the Interdisciplinary Research of Ocean, Climate and Society (ROCS) at the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with Earth scientist, Professor Katherine Richardson, this publication showcases how artistic practices – such as image-making, conceptual mapping, and filmmaking – enhance scientific representation.

Mud… and the Earth System features commissioned essays from experts in Earth Science, Political Aesthetics, and Molecular Geobiology. The book pairs their insights with compelling artwork, including large-scale maps of emerging ‘mudscapes’ in Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland, and Gotland.

The essays give perspectives on the DNA that is collected and stored in mud, which connects life across timescales as an evolutionary resource framing the interactions of human societies with the extreme complexities of the Earth system. Esther Leslie’s “Mud Crystal and Polar Thinking” sets the scene, followed by Karina K. Sand’s “Death and Life:  in Mud: Two Million Years in a Split Second,” and Earth scientist Katherine Richardson’s contribution “A Muddy Diary.”

As Richardson sums up, “Mud is an important medium for storing the archives that describe the history of both life and climate on Earth, and we are only just beginning to understand the fantastic stories that mud can tell.”

Contributions by Esther Leslie, Rikke Luther, Katherine Richardson, Karina Sand

What does it mean to be a curator who writes, and, more specifically, how can curators write about textiles? This publication steps outside the framework of the typical exhibition catalogue to occupy "the space between literature and criticism".

The Community of writers was set up to create time and space to retreat from these outside opinions and demands and to let curiosity and the joy of writing be the driving forces of the writing process. This book has been realised under the auspice of Interweaving Structures: Fabric as Material, Method, and Message, and specifically through collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen and the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź. The two partners have strong positions of specialisation—the museum acts as a caretaker of material textile traditions and art in Poland, and the faculty has a strong textile art tradition and offers the only education programme for curators in Norway.

Edited by Anne Szefer Karlsen.
Contributions by Andreas Hoffmann, Heather Jones, Martina Petrelli, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Lea Vene, Johanna Zanon.

Afghanistan is my father’s homeland. He was born in Kabul in 1945 and later moved first to France, then to Switzerland in the 1970s. In my mind, Afghanistan exists as a geography with blurred edges, something I feel the need to reconcile with. It’s a place I’ve only ever known through stories, a source of memories that, over time, have shifted and become distorted.

Contributors: Luca Cerizza, Farid Rahimi, Said Rahimi, Susanna Ravelli, Francesca Recchia, Zafar Sayan, and Dawood Tawana

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whispered to her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book
and a memoir. Viewing it brings us face to face with known and unknown cultures and introduces us to various art practices shared, taught, and learned through the African diasporic traditions. Fawundu connects to the self through history, joy, and beauty and offers the reader ways to navigate fear based on migration and loss. It is a gift, too, as it allows us to imagine alongside the artist.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY of Mende, Bubi, and Krim descent.
Through photography, video, textile-based sculptural forms, and performance, she creates embodied entities inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual retentions across time and space. She co-authored the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Edited by Chiara Figone

Contributions by Mistura Allison, Berette S Macaulay, Niama Sandy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Deborah Willis

“Invest in a floating city or gentrify a submerged one.”

Nourhan Maayouf’s I Was Going to Work is a hybrid sci-fi picture book by the Cairo-based artist, in which the proto-cyborg citizens of Happy Land Nation establish new-fashioned diurnal rhythms against the ever-present backdrop of a monorail to nowhere and its pillars, idle and idolatrous.

Across forty-four spreads of what might be thought of as a picture book for adults, Maayouf delves into every aspect of a deeply familiar society in which retrograde devolution is billboarded as reinvention by Orwellian technocrats and speculators.

And yet pockets of the cyborg population continue striving, dreaming, craving, protesting, gleaning, and inventing. For a situation to be bleak, some notion of beauty must remain tenaciously rooted where it matters most.

A manifesto for the decolonization of art book fairs and publishing.

Can we decolonize art book fairs? Can we decentralize knowledge and deconstruct privilege in our contexts? Decolonizing Art Book Fairs aims to rethink through the existing and speculative frameworks of organizational practice in the art book fairs. This workbook attempts to introduce new narratives and help deconstruct the frontiers between north(s) and south(s), putting an emphasis on practitioners and initiatives from the African continent and diaspora. A workbook with (primarily newly commissioned) texts and interviews.

Contributions by Jean-Claude Awono, Yaiza Camps, Chayet Chiénin, Chimurenga, Renata Felinto, Wanjeri Gakuru, Moritz Grünke, Aryan Kaganof, Sharlene Khan, Grada Kilomba, Carla Lever, Fouad Asfour, Dzekashu MacViban, Gladys Mendía, James Murua, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Simon Njami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Monica Nkodo, O Menelick 2Ato, Pascale Obolo, Michalis Pichler, Mario Pissarra, Sergio Raimundo, Djimeli Raoul, Flurina Rothenberger, Bienvenu Sene, Bisi Silva, Kwanele Sosibo, Parfait Tabapsi, Louise Umutoni, Zamân Books & Curating.