It's time to introduce our multitalented international jury who will select the participants of the Advanced Visual Storytelling Educational Programme taking place in Ivory Coast this year.
The NOOR Advanced Visual Storytelling Educational Programme is a long-term training tract in partnership with the Chocolonely Foundation. We have joined hands to organise an extensive educational programme in West Africa to bring together young talent and communities, create a collective space, develop creative collaborative processes, and shape up new narratives.
This initiative will bring together the talent of regional visual storytellers, the knowledge of community facilitators, the NOOR mentoring expertise and the underrepresented voices of the workers of the cocoa communities in Ivory Coast.
This week, our international panel of highly accomplished jury members is coming together to choose out of all the applications we received 12 participants who will take part in this programme in 2023.
Ken Aicha Sy – founder Wakh’Art and Idea Box
Ken Aicha Sy was born in Dakar, from a Franco-Martinican mother, journalist and a Senegalese plastic artist father, she grew up in the Senegalese capital before going to study in Paris in Design and Art History ... It was during the period of the World Festival of Negro Arts that Ken Aicha returned to Senegal. Sensitive to the creative environment and the cause of Senegalese artists, she sets up a cultural platform called Wakh'Art to participate in the promotion of Senegalese cultural industries. Sometimes producer, sometimes curator, Ken Aicha Sy is a woman active in culture. Through her space the Idea Box, now installed on the small coast, she fights to follow her motto: she works to make art a factor of development and emancipation.
Ishola Akpo – photographer, programme mentor
Ishola Akpo (b. 1983) is a photographer and multimedia artist in Benin. The artist experiments with the possibilities of digital mediums, while mixing modernities and traditions in his work, playing on different levels of reading to make plural metaphors. The border between reality and fiction, fixed identities and multiple identities, remains at the heart of his approach. In 2013, he won the Visa pour la Creation (French Institute, Paris), where he presented the series Pas de flash sil vous plait! – A reflection on the interaction of light on photographed subjects, presented in the form of a performance and exhibition at the Institut Francais de Cotonou.
In 2014, he published the series L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux (Africa Is NoIsland, MACAAL, Fair 1.54 in Morocco, 2018), based on a family experience, which illustrates his grandmother's dowry, while insisting on its memory load.
This reflection will lead him to explore contemporary marriage. In 2015, with the series Les maris de notre poque, Ishola Akpo, won the Photoquai, entering the collection of the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris.
Since then he has multiples artistic residencies: Montresso Foundation (Morocco) with the Dabi series and more recently the Zinsou Foundation (Benin) with 'AGBARA Women' presented at the Ouidah Museum as an ode to the power of women, embodied with portraits of known and forgotten queens from African history. His work has been presented in several major international events including: The Museum of the History of Immigration, (Palais de la Porte Dore, Africa 2020 - Paris), Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt (Germany), Fotonoviembre, Tenerife (Spain), Nuit Blanche de Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Lagosphotos Festival (Nigeria), Festival Afreaka (Brazil).
Julie Banâtre and Léa Perier Loko – founders and directors SEPTIEME Gallery
SEPTIEME transmits a cosmopolitan vision, by questioning affiliations and exploring the subtlety of the world. The gallery hopes to disturb perceptions and work with commitment, to make its activity a manifesto of the in-between.
Founded in 2019 in Paris in the 7th arrondissement, the gallery quickly took on significant growth where it imposed its place as a young, dynamic and cosmopolitan gallery. The gallery works in favor of an international influence and a deep integration into the world art market, by participating in fairs in cities as eclectic as they are pillars of the art world (Beirut, Cape Town, London, Lagos, New York, Miami).
Based in Paris in a Haussmann-style setting, SEPTIEME wanted to open a second space in September 2022 in Cotonou, Benin, in a 200m2 warehouse in the center of the city in order to offer exhibitions in a new format to meet people. of the public in the West African sub-region. It made sense for SEPTIEME to deploy its vision spatially and participate in pushing back the frontiers of contemporary art as well as contributing to the construction of new strongholds of contemporary art, the city of Cotonou being in full cultural and artistic for several years.
Illa G. Donwahi – president and artistic director Donwahi Foundation
Born in Abidjan, Illa G. Donwahi, an economist by training, grew up in Ivory Coast, before continuing her studies in France and the United States.
Collector, independent curator, I. G. Donwahi created in 2008 in Abidjan the Charles Donwahi Foundation for contemporary art, with the general objectives to participate in the socialization of art, and to remedy the ignorance from which the whole of African artistic production internationally, but also within the borders of the continent.
Visual arts, living arts, through its exhibition programs, its workshops, artist residencies, external collaborations, the Donwahi Foundation dedicates its spaces to contemporary creation in all its plurality, and thus brings support, accompaniment, visibility to creators and animators of the cultural scene. An incubator, a place of exchange and sharing open to artists from all walks of life, and to the public, the donwahi foundation also aims to be a place of convergence and transmission of our identities, a bridge between our past, our present and our future.
Illa g. Donwahi has also participated as a curator or speaker at various editions of the Dakar Biennale, at art fairs paris art fair, 1:54 london, akaa. External collaborations include major projects such as the moleskine foundation's atwork program, the one carried out with the sindika dokolo foundation, and with the "clavé archives" at the 2022 venice biennale, as well as future partnerships with, in particular, the nubuke foundation , and the secular solidarity association. Keynote speaker at the opening of the 2018 cape town fair, member of the catchlight 2020 visual leadership fellowship jury, portfolios reviewer at addis foto fest, panelist at canex weekend 2022.
Seydou Camara – photographer, artistic director of Yamarou photo
Seydou Camara, born in 1983 in Ségou in the fourth administrative region in Mali. Since his childhood, he has had a passion for the image. Thus, after obtaining his degree in private law at the University of Bamako, he preferred to enroll in 2007 at the Center de Formation en photographie (CFP) in Bamako.
After exhibiting at Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Documenta 15 in Kassel (Germany). He was just the finalist for the Howard Chapnick Scholarship 2022.
In 2018 he was selected for the 100 photographers of the World who exhibited at the festival in Wilson. He is the holder of the Fondation Blachère prize; He was selected for the 11th and 8th edition of the Biennale des Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako. Subsequently his images were published in many catalogs and magazines such as l'Insensé and Aperture.
He trains many young people in photography in all regions of Mali and in the sub-regions. He has also hosted conferences in the United States, Switzerland and France, his works are collected by one of the largest museums in the United States and at Carlton University. He is the founder of "collective Yamarou - Photo: A space for exchange and meeting around photography". He was also the president of Phot'art Mali.
Bénédicte Kurzen – photographer, NOOR author
Kurzen’s photographic career began when she moved to Israel in 2003, covering hard news as a freelancer in the Gaza Strip, Iraq and Lebanon. Bénédicte holds a master’s degree in Contemporary History from the Sorbonne, Paris. For the past twenty years, Bénédicte has been covering conflicts and socio-economical changes in Africa. In South Africa, where she was based, she explored some of the deepest social challenges of the post-apartheid society producing “Next of Kin”, “The Boers Last Stand” and “Amaqabane”, on the life of former anti-apartheid combatants. The latest was produced for the prestigious World Press Joop Swart Masterclass 2008.
In 2011, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center, which allowed her to produce a body of work on Nigeria, “A Nation Lost to Gods”. Her work has been screened and exhibited at Visa pour l’Image and was nominated for the Visa d’Or in 2012. After becoming a NOOR full member in 2012, she decided to move to Lagos, from where she could pursue her coverage of Africa, with a focus on Nigeria. She won a World Press Photo for her collaborative project with NOOR Photographer Sanne De Wilde for "Land of Ibeji" in 2019.
Élise Fitte-Duval – artist and photographer
Artist born in Martinique, Élise Fitte-Duval lives and works in Senegal for twenty years. She graduated from the School of Plastic Arts of Martinique (DNAP, 1989) and the National School of Arts Decorative Paris in photography in 1996. She pursues a photographic search for form narrative. She received the Casa Africa award for a woman photographer at the Photographic Meetings of Bamako 2011. Until 2018, Élise Fitte-Duval was photographer editor at the Panapress press agency, pan-African news agency at the headquarters in Dakar. One of her first series “Portraits Nus” produced in Paris, where she resided at the time, was presented during the Revue Noire exhibition in Bamako in 1994, at the des Trois Continents in Nantes in 1998 and appeared in the anthology of black woman photography: The Black Female Body by Deborah Willis.
Seeking to tell stories, she became interested in world of creation of contemporary dancers Africans. This research has been exposed under the title. Dance for Hope at the Pan-African PANAF Festival in Algiers within the exhibition Reflections of Africa and at the gallery Le Carousel in the collective exhibition Danses, in June 2009. Since then, she continues to collaborate with the companies of dance. Continuing her series of portraits of humans in their struggles with everyday life, she exhibits her series Vivre les pays in water at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Cape Town in 2010, at the Fort-de-France festival and was finally awarded at the Bamako Biennale in 2011. Then she continued her narrative research by working on the topicality of civic engagement, Dakar, Ouagadougou and Madrid. His reflection on the city and its inhabitants evolves with the Trottoirs series in 2018. It collaborates with organizations to which it offers its vision of portraits and landscapes, in particular his last virtual exhibition "Invisible Giants", in 2020.
Marie-Cécile Zinsou – founder and artistic director Zinsou Foundation
Born in 1982, of French and Beninese nationality, Marie-Cécile Zinsou, after studies in France and England, began teaching art history in Benin, at the secondary school of crafts Sos Hermann Gmeiner, in Abomey Calavi, in 2003. In 2005, she created, in Cotonou, the Zinsou Foundation, dedicated to contemporary art and her influence – foundation over which she presides and of which she is the artistic director. In 2013, she opened the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ouidah and joined the Global Museum Leader Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Since 2015, Marie-Cécile Zinsou has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles and, since 2019, of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Islamic Cultures. She chairs the board of directors of La Maison Maria Casarès, a cultural center dedicated at the theater, located in Charente.
On the proposal of the French Minister of Culture in October 2021, the president of the French Republic appointed Marie-Cécile Zinsou Chairman of the Board Board of Directors of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici for a term of three years. Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, she received through the action of the Foundation Zinsou, the Praemium Imperiale - Grant for young artists - in 2014 in Japan.
Header photo: © Ishola Akpo