Joana Choumali, The Resilients Project
About:
Joana Choumali, born in 1974, is a fine art photographer based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. She studied Graphic Arts in Casablanca (Morocco) and worked as an Art Director in an advertising agency before embarking on her photography career.
She works primarily on conceptual portraiture, mixed media and documentary. She uses her photography to explore her own identity. Much of her work focuses on Africa, and what she, as an African, is learning about the myriad cultures around her. Her work allows her to explore assumptions she has and nourishes her as she expands her conceptions of the world.
About the project:
Resilients 2013 – 2014 The Black continent is a perpetual reincarnation, surfacing into limitless rhizomes. But it is mutating…This is somehow its resiliency… The African women, who have so many faces and realities, surely are one of its mots beautiful expressions. In them, are concentrated, both the strengths and the splits of the continent. Its retrogressions and its modernizations. Whereas Africa has been so many times profaned, … They are there.
Standing. Upright. Surviving. The sex role defined for the women in Africa changes according to where shedwells : city or village. Between rurality and city-dwelling, the profiles evolve. The city is liberating and the countries bear huge metropolis in their cores. So, women are freer there and they escape the village and its customs, considered retrograde. Break up the link ? Resilients. Should the traditions end up in escheat ?
« Resilients » show that lineage is inextinguishable. Clothed with their mothers’s and grandmothers’s ornaments, they reveal legacies. Inheritance. The Black women, revealed in their ancestrality through their photographies, demonstrate the importance of their cultural heritage. In them, there is the memory of an aesthetic tradition, which makes their sap, their roots…(text website artist)(copyright: the artist)