The title of the 8th Bamako Encounters, ‘Borders’, is shared by a re-curated selection of works from the biennale showing at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Travelling the contents of the biennale - an art world event traditionally characterised by regionalism - was an important gesture in the context of this theme. As this year’s artistic directors Michket Krifa and Laura Serani point out in a curatorial statement accompanying the event, national borders in Africa are increasingly impenetrable. Foreigners and ethnic outsiders are stigmatised and often victimised, and emigration between African states can be unpredictably difficult or dangerous. In addition to this, social rifts between the rich and the poor entrench the power of economic boundaries on the continent. By relocating from Bamako to the opposite end of Africa, ‘Borders’ traverses the physical distance between South Africa and Mali, a simple gesture of the sort which happens so seldom in Africa and yet is vital to the existence of artistic exchange and mutual awareness within the continent.
In their curatorial statement, Michket and Krifa define a border as the limit of a particular territory, 'beyond which is the elsewhere, the otherwise and the foreign'. The 'theme of the alien' is therefore the corollary of the theme of borders, they write. Several of the works on ‘Borders’ foreground experiences of foreignness; what it is to have crossed a national border and yet remian on the periphery of the soceity that ‘belongs’ within that border. Mohammed Camara’s Les Mailens à Paris portrays the isolation of a Malian family living in an apartment in Paris. In one image in the series, a heap of clothes and bags in the corner of the interior suggests that the family is not yet comfortable in their Parisian home. A makeshift curtain is drawn in broad daylight, while a well-dressed woman peers through an opening in it. With the woman’s carefully coordinated outfit and high-heel shoes it seems unlkely that the disarray of her apartment is due to neglect. She may have just arrived in the city, or, the possibility exists that she has been there for some time but has never ‘settled in’. The drawn curtain is a tangible articulation of a national, racial and social border that exists between the woman and Paris. She is excluded from the daily life of native Parisians (who are reputably nationalistic and historically white), amongst whom, as a black foreigner, she feels marginalised.
South African photographer Lebohang Mahiloane’s series Somali Refugees highlights a similar instance of alienation. Residing in South Africa, a group of Somali immigrants lacks the basic rights to which South African citizens are entitled such as state health services and support grants. Moreover, they are socially marginalised and, as a result, their primary human rights to shelter, food and safety are under threat as well. While these examples draw attention to a pressing social issue - xenophopia and ethnic and racial prejudice within Africa, and as experienced by Africans - they are a predictable inclusion in an exhibition on this theme. Far more compelling are works on the show that explore an alternative, but related, interpretation of the theme. Borders are not only exclusionary structures; they can also be sites of crossing and transition. In this light, they can obscure difference rather than entrench it.
Majida Khattari’s Veiled/Unveiled series challenges the extent to which external markers of culture, such as clothing and visible affiliations with religious groups, can accurately articulate difference. In a work titled Lace, a dark-haired woman, who plays a religious Muslim in the four pictures that comprise this series, shares her lace veil with a blonde woman who is naked but for some ornate bands around her waist. In this image, the appearance of the two women functions as a marker of their cultural difference, but, in the act of sharing the veil face-to-face, they have an intimate encounter, a moment of togetherness. The veil, as a garment which can be seen to exclude Muslim woman from public life, becomes a site at which two individuals connect.
These observations hold for both presentations of 'Borders', and it would be appropriate, given the conceptual importance of this second iteration of the exhibition, to comment on its re-curation at JAG. In its original form, 'Borders' represented almost equal proportions of photographic and video works. With 30 video artists to the 40 photographers included, this biennale seemed to attempt a blurring of the borders between photography and other lens-based media. At JAG, photographic works dominate, which is to the credit of the exhibition. Though some compelling video pieces have been chosen for this version of the exhibition – Rana El Nemr’s Olympic Garden (2008) video tryptych stands out, as does Ismail Bahri’s stop-frame animation Resonances (2008) – the display of the video works is weak compared with the curation of the photographs, with two video pieces aurally and spatially dominating the 11 that are included. Technical glitches, explosively high volumes on headphones and insufficient space to show all the videos selected in appropriately dark conditions detracts, unfortunately, from what is otherwise an impressively polished and visually arresting curatorial effort.
