I would be exhibiting at the 12th edition of the Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography—the singular photographic and lens-based art biennale on the African continent—will run in Bamako, Mali, from November 30, 2019 to January 31, 2020, celebrating its 25 years of existence since the first edition in 1994.
Titled Streams of Consciousness, after the eponymous 1977 record by Abdullah Ibrahim and Max Roach, the Biennale will employ multiple understandings of how such streams can be used as photographic tools. Tools that bridge the African continent with its various diasporas, in addition to conveying cultures and epistemologies. “Africa” has, after all, long ceased to be a concept limited to the geographical space called Africa. Africa as a planetary concept relates to people of African origin, the I & I, that are spread over the world in Asia, Oceania, Europe, the Americas and the African continent.
The exhibition will apply the notion of the stream of consciousness as a metaphor for the flux of ideas, peoples, cultures that flow across and along with rivers like the Niger, Congo, Nile or Mississippi.
