Installation View ©︎ Kenryou Gu-KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023
KYOTO ABJ 2, hand embroidery on digital photography printed on canvas, 20X30 cm ©Joana Choumali, 2023
KYOTO ABJ 1, hand embroidery on digital photography printed on canvas, 20X30 cm ©Joana Choumali, 2023
KYOTO ABJ 4, hand embroidery on digital photography printed on canvas, 20X30 cm ©Joana Choumali, 2023
This project was inspired by the theme of this year’s edition of Kyotographie: Borders.
Markets are intense, diverse, rich and always-alive places where the ideal and the reality of a community mix together. Markets are among the first places a tourist explores when visiting a new city, and at the same time the place the city’s inhabitants go for their daily needs.
Every country, every culture, has its own markets, with their particular colours, sounds, perfumes, and personages. Yet markets are all similar in the way they viscerally connect with the essence of a community’s life.
Joana decided to create images that blend the borders between Japan and Côte d’Ivoire, placing images shot in a Kyoto market next to images shot in an Abidjan market, and obscuring the visual boundary between the two through her embroidery.
The resulting images represent and evoke our shared humanity, with each shopkeeper, portrayed in front of their own shop, connected by the colorful threads and embroidered lines of the artist to his or her twin on a different continent.
Creating the illusion of a single image through embroidery, Joana makes visible her own imaginary market, where Kyotoites and Abidjanaises are neighbors. In this virtual space, the people portrayed work side by side, their different personalities and cultures free to spend time together, making it even more evident how much they have in common.
▍Joana Choumali
Born in 1974, Joana Choumali is a visual artist / 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 mainly in conceptual portraiture, mixed media, and documentary photography. Much of her work focuses on Africa, and what she has learned about its myriad cultures. Her major awards include the CapPrize Award (2014) and the Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award (2014). In 2019, she became the first African to win the 8th Prix Pictet for her series Ça va aller (It will be ok) on the theme of ‘Hope.’ Her book HAABRE, THE LAST GENERATION, was published in Johannesburg in 2016. In 2020, she was named a Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University.
