In Trieste, for the first time in Italy, an exhibition brings together three leading figures in African photography

From February 18 to June 11, 2023, the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste presents the exhibition African Portraits. Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, curated by Filippo Maggia. Among the leading figures in photography of the last half-century, the three artists have only been discovered in the West in recent years, and their personal stories have helped make their works even more fascinating.

Produced and organized by ERPAC - Ente Regionale per il Patrimonio Culturale del Friuli Venezia Giulia, the exhibition presents for the first time in Italy a selection of more than one hundred works by the three photographers, made available by C.A.A.C. The Contemporary African Art Collection in Geneva, the Jean Marc Patras Gallery in Paris, the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive and numerous private lenders.

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

Of a later generation is Samuel Fosso. He, too, began his career in a small photographic studio with no ambition to be an artist, but his work, which alternates black and white with color, is not composed like Keïta’s and Sidibé’s of portraits of others. Fosso begins almost as a joke to portray himself, and his work develops through self-portraits in which he ironically interprets stereotypes of Africa seen through the eyes of the West or in which he reincarnates, starting with Malcolm X, the figures symbolic of black emancipation.

The itinerary can be considered a “relay race,” as curator Filippo Maggia calls it, which allows the exhibition to cover a long period of African history. “Keïta,” Maggia writes, “is active in the years leading up to Mali’s independence (which occurred in 1960), Sidibé lives and narrates the years immediately following independence, Fosso was born in the years when several African countries achieved independence. A relay race that we also find in the content of their images, as if the narrative thread traced by Keïta in the late 1940s had then found its own evolutionary path that runs hand in hand with the progressive conquest and manifestation of a conscious ’African-ness,’ a hallmark that we read in their portraits, which not coincidentally become self-portraits in Fosso.”

Through the genre of the portrait, which for historical, political, social and religious reasons has been the favorite genre of many African photographers, the exhibition thus aims to tell through images an Africa of rebirth and search for its own identity, documenting the social aspirations of the subjects photographed against the backdrop of a cultural, political and economic reality with characteristics and urgencies far removed from those of the West.

The reconstruction of a photographic studio such as Keïta and Sidibé’s completes the exhibition. This is an opportunity to identify with the places and atmosphere from which many of the photographs in the exhibition originated, taking a portrait of oneself on a never-before-seen set with vintage furniture and objects that recall the very setting of the works on display. The photograph can be posted on one’s social channels using the hashtags and tags #magazzinodelleidee @magazzinodelleidee

For info: www.magazzinodelleidee.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Image: Malick Sidibé, Mrs. Kadiatou Touré with my glasses, detail (1963; silver salt gelatin print). Courtesy of Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection and Galerie Magnin-A, Paris

In Trieste, for the first time in Italy, an exhibition brings together three leading figures in African photography

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