PARIS.- PIASA will be staging a new sale devoted to African Contemporary Art in Paris on 18 April 2018, with works from the effervescent African scene by Chéri Samba, Moke, Bodo, Bandoma, JP Mika, Lavar Munroe, Slimen El Kamen, Mahi Binebine, Aboudia, Zinkpè and Boris Nzebo.

One section of the sale will concentrate on portraiture photography. The enthusiasm for photography across Africa is reflected in the success of Les Rencontres de Bamako (launched in 1994) and the Lagos Photo Festival (since 2014). PIASA’s sale will feature both rising stars and established names, offering a new approach to African photography that proves that the inheritance of portrait masters like Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita – shown at the Grand Palais and the Fondation Cartier in Paris – is in safe hands.

Since 2014 PIASA has showcased African contemporary art in two annual sales, often with a specific theme. This Spring the focus of attention will be African Photography, via committed artists with a new approach to what matters in Africa.

OMAR VICTOR DIOP: HEIR TO STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY
Like Seydou Keïta and Samuel Fosso, Senegal’s Omar Victor Diop is inspired as much by African studio portraitists and coloured fabrics as by Pop culture and fashion photography. His work has been acclaimed at both the Bamako Biennale to Les Rencontres d’Arles.

‘I try to transform the forgotten past into the present – to kickstart a dialogue’ he explains. His Studio des Vanités portrays a generation of talented youngsters in creative urban Africa, where Diop grew up and still lives. Through these portraits he represents Africa at its most modern and dynamic, in all its burgeoning diversity. These posed, artfully staged portraits position Diop as an heir to African studio photography, in a context of great optimism for today’s Africa.

LEONCE RAPHAËL AGBODJELOU : WITNESS TO MODERN UPHEAVAL
Léonce Raphaël Agbodjelou (born Porto-Novo 1965) – who trained with his father, the renowned photographer Joseph Moïse Agbodjelou (1912-2000) – has made the portrait his mode of expression. His founded the Porto-Novo School of Photography and is a key figure in contemporary photography in Benin. He photographs inhabitants in the streets of the Benin capital in broad daylight and, through them, captures their traditions, religious rites and modernity. His 2011 Egugun series refers to rites in the eponymous religious ceremony practised by the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Clad from head to foot in brightly-coloured costumes, the Yoruba invoke the spirits to pacify and avert evil liable to affect their community. Following on from this series, and from his Demoiselles de Porto-Novo and Musclemen series (2012), Agbodjelou conveys a generation caught between tradition and progress. His work has been shown in such prestigious venues as the Saatchi Gallery (London), Brooklyn Museum (New York), Vitra Museum (Basel) and Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao), and aquired by such major institutions as Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, reflecting his international status.

GOSETTE LUBONDO: THE MEMORY OF THINGS
Gosette Lubondo (born Kinshasa 1993) is also the heir to the talent and experience of a photographer father. She graduated in Visual Communication from the Kinshasa Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2014, with the support of the Goethe Institute of Johannesburg and art critic Simon Njami, co-founder of Revue Noire magazine. After collaborating with the artists’ collectives Eza Possible and Atelier M’Pongo, she took part in the Rencontres de Bamako in 2015, She is a member of the Kin ArtStudio founded in Kinshasa in 2010.

Lubondo derives her inspiration from her everyday environment. Rail and sea transport – often degraded or dilapidated, though not necessarily out of service – recurs in her work. Her Imaginary Trip series (2016), dealing with tangible traces of the past, features human figures and/or diverse objects in what seems to be an abandoned railway carriage, highlighting not just the tension between old and new but also between human presence and its imprint on places and things. Her approach is influenced by the possible renewal of these means of transport: ‘Is there no way to give new life to these machines?’ she asked at the Lady By Lady exhibition held at Kinshasa’s Meko Centre Culturel in 2014. She also questions the relationship between Man and his mechanical inventions, using such photographic metaphors as rusting machinery to evoke the decline of Congolese society.

NYABA LEON OUEDRAOGO: A SOCIAL READING OF THE AFRICAN CONTINENT
Nyaba Léon Ouedraogo (born Burkina Faso 1978) is a self-taught phtographer who criss-crossed Europe, Brazil and the United States to report for Jeune Afrique and other magazines. He is co-founder the Topics Visual Arts Platform, a photographic exchange laboratory, and has pursued a keen interest in African work and living conditions since 2003. His work was shown at the Musée Dapper (2012); Musée du Quai Branly (2013); the Institut Français in Ouagadougou; the Fondation Blachère; and the Manchester Art Gallery (2015). On top of such institutional recognition, he was awarded the Prix Pictet in 2010 and the Rencontres de Bamako E.U. Prize in 2011. He divides his time between Paris and Ouagadougou.

His photographs offer a social reading of Africa, and his ‘contemporary preoccupation is to see how Africa lives today.’ The human figure occupies a central place in his compositions, as he offers a glimpse of mystical beliefs deeply entrenched in society. Works like Can (2008) and City Mines (2010) deal with the themes of social exclusion and joblessness. ‘I consider myself an art-documentary photographer’ he says, adding that he records the realities of evolving African society ‘using an aesthetic and ethical approach.’