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AKAA: Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté invites you to discover African creation

Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté at AKAA, the largest French fair for artists from Africa and its diasporas.

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

5 mins

His tapestries, paintings, sculptures populate collections and museums all over the world.

Born in 1953 in Diré, Mali, Abdoulaye Konaté is one of the biggest names in contemporary art.

AKAA, the largest French fair for artists from Africa and its diasporas, hosts nine monumental works by the master of woven bazin canvases with their infinite range of colors.

Until October 23, at the Carreau du temple in the heart of Paris.

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Abdoulaye Konaté

On this work, for example, you have a Dogon symbol, at the same time, you have round circles which are elements embroidered by Moroccan women.

And in the center of the piece, you have the weaving of a great Moroccan master, one of the last great masters of textile weavings in Morocco.

With the bazin that we find in Mali, I try to merge all that to make visible this common thread that passes between the Maghreb and the Sahel.

Your creations impress by their size, by the physical aspect of the weaving which almost makes us feel the thousands of gestures carried out to accomplish this work, but also by the force of a mosaic of colors which touches us and invites us to open up.

What is the role of color in your artistic process

I try to study colors.

I draw a lot of inspiration from nature, insects, animals, the sky… but also from the clothing of our people.

I observe what people wear, in Africa, but also in Europe or Asia.

I try to appropriate all this visual environment, this taste, and this "natural" fact concerning animals, insects, plants.

I try to rework all this to create a new aesthetic vision.

In the room described above, red dominates.

In another room, very light and very dark colors coexist.

What is the starting point of this composition

This composition is a study of colors at the level of gray.

It goes from black to white.

To this, I integrate red and white.

These three colors, white, red and black, have a certain meaning in our ancient cultures.

By making sacrifices of these colors - whether it is an object, a textile or in the form of an animal - people think that it has a force and an energy.

I base myself on this concept of the energy of the colors in the tradition to make it a new composition of this range of gray, black or clear white.

When we look at these innumerable strips of textiles, these cut and woven legs of your painting, there is a structure that appears, without knowing whether it points downwards, towards the ground or the roots, or rather upwards, towards the sky.

Is it wanted

They point in both directions.

Generally, in all these compositions, there is a darker value at the top which fades downwards.

But when you get to the bottom, you have to lift your head to make the circuit between all the colors.

For you, it all started in Mali, at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Bamako.

Then you studied in Cuba.

Since you received the Grand Prize at the Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar in 1996, you have exhibited your works all over the world, from Mali to Japan, from Brazil to the United States, from the United Kingdom to France.

Your installations and woven paintings have been presented both at the legendary

exhibition and in very prestigious institutions and museums such as the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, the Arab World Institute or the Museum of Modern Art in the City of Paris, documented it in Kassel or the Venice Biennale.

Today, do you feel that the circulation of your works on the African continent is satisfactory

I exhibit in the Ivory Coast, in Senegal, in the Maghreb countries, in South Africa, in Uganda, in the Seychelles… But the circulation of works of art in Africa is very limited.

Even for artists who live in Africa to come to Europe, it is also limited.

There are many constraints for the circulation of works.

Transport and money constraints, but there are also a lot of administrative constraints.

In Africa, we circulate a little bit, thanks to the Biennials and the fairs which are beginning to gain in importance.

Thanks also to the patrons, but, I would say that all of this is a start…

And you also try to help young artists.

Yes, three years ago we created the African Culture Fund (ACF) to support young people by helping them fund their projects [

].

It is the effort of several African artists.

We make calls to certain great artists [

] who donate works to the collection and which we offer for sale once or twice a year.

There is an international jury that selects the artists.

We fund projects from $2,000 up to $10,000.

Our contribution is complementary to funding that the artist already has.

During the Covid epidemic, we also funded workshops to allow artists to hold this stage of difficulty where there were almost no sales.

The artists could not even pay for the operation of the studio or the rental of the studio…

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