We embark on our walk through Afrotopias by turning towards the projects by two women: Mbali Dhalmini and Melanie Issaka. In their works, which combine personal experience with historical reflection, both artists raise the extremely important issue of the politicization of the Black woman’s identity.
The body of the African woman, historically reified as an object of colonial enslavement and subjugation, is still played out as a political entity that is subjected to discourses of racialization and gender. And the medium of photography has been entangled in the creation and perpetuation of these violent discourses for decades.
In their critical projects, Dhalmini and Issaka assert the subjectivity of a Black woman who is put under double pressure – that of racism and that of patriarchy. The artists address this subject in an unobvious, metaphorical manner. Instead of working with a photographic image of the woman’s body, they both speak about it with the use of blue fabric.
The blue color that appears in the series Investigation by Mbali Dhalmini is indigo – a natural dye obtained in West Africa by boiling the indigo plant for a long time. The artist used colonial portraits of women selected from the collection of the national archives in Senegal, then removed the bodies and landscapes from them, leaving only the fabrics. She soaked the traditional garments, deprived of their colors in the black and white photographs, in the indigo dye again, thus reclaiming and restoring them to the native tradition, practiced by Senegalese women for centuries.
Born in 1990, is a multidisciplinary artist and visual researcher. She lives and works in Johannesburg. In 2015, she graduated with a master’s degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. Dhlamini performs visual, tactile, and discursive investigations into current Indigenous cultural practices. With a view toward decolonized practices in contemporary culture, her work is in constant conversation with her past and present visual landscapes. Working to maintain a state of unlearning and relearning, in her process, Dhlamini recognizes language as a medium of understanding and as a repository of knowledge. Dhlamini’s visual research considers ‘site-specific discourse’ as a methodology. She presented her projects in Dakar, Senegal, at the Black Rock Senegal artist residency in 2021, and within the Raw Materials Company Fellowship in 2017. Her recent undertaking using archival materials from the World Council of Churches was performed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2021. Her work has been exhibited in art galleries and institutions locally and internationally.
© Mbali Dhlamini
The blue in photographs by Melanie Issaka is of a different origin. It is a cyanotype. This noble photographic technique was used by the artist in a deliberately subversive manner. In a precisely thought-out series of studio photographs, a Black woman’s body was partially covered with a canvas on which a cyanotype print of this very body was later made. We are therefore dealing with a narrative about the body of an African woman recorded as a negative – in white. The positive and the negative merge in the photographs through the choreography of gestures. The clear and political aspects of this project were additionally emphasized by the title – Blueprint: Black Skin, White Mask – which directly refers to Franz Fanon’s iconic book on the psychoanalytical aspects of racism.
Born in 1994 in Ghana, is a London-based visual artist who navigates the complexities of identity where race and gender intersect. Through analog and digital photography and printmaking, she challenges conventional notions of presentation and (re)presentation. Her work probes the dichotomy of private and public spaces, negotiating visibility while embracing materiality to assert physical presence and explore the depths of selfhood.
© Melanie Issaka
© Melanie Issaka
