Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Joana Choumali’s Embroidered, Photographic Series ‘Ça Va Aller’

In the series “Ça va aller,” photographer Joana Choumali adds embroidery to images captured of her African hometown, Abidjan, in the days after the March 2016 Grand-Bassam terrorist attack that took 19 lives and injured 33. She began embroidering as a way to cope, with the series evolving from this approach. The artist observed a melancholic population following the event.

In the series “Ça va aller,” photographer Joana Choumali adds embroidery to images captured of her African hometown, Abidjan, in the days after the March 2016 Grand-Bassam terrorist attack that took 19 lives and injured 33. She began embroidering as a way to cope, with the series evolving from this approach. The artist observed a melancholic population following the event.

“Most of the pictures show empty places, and people by themselves, walking in the streets or just standing, sitting alone, lost in their thoughts,” she says. “‘ça va aller’ means ‘it will be OK.’ This typical Ivorian expression is used for everything, even for situations that are not going to be OK. This work is a way to address the way ivorian people deal with psychological suffering.”

See more works from the series below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Pretty much every kid loves playing with cardboard boxes. Taiwanese photographer and graphic designer Sydney Sie never stopped playing with them. Her series "Unexpectable Boxes" captures the essence of our childhood pretending in surprising and surreal photographs. In bold candy colors, her images reveal her subjects' faces, fingers and feet peeking out of holes in artificial spaces built by Sie.
Before the cyanotype was popularized by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Derges and Florian Neusüss in the 1960s, it was used by architects, astronomers and botanists. It is therefore fitting that contemporary artist Tasha Lewis appropriates this method of camera-less photography to make anthropological sculptures. To transform her two-dimensional cyanotypes into three-dimensional objects, Lewis uses mixed-media paper, tape, wood, and wire to build the forms of human portraits, birds in flight and thawing animals, among other shapes and characters. She then uses a photochemical reduction process to print on cloth, which she hand-sews and patchworks together. The artist refers to this outer layer as the "skin" of her sculptures.
Chinese artist Liu Bolin is a chameleon. From a first glance, his most well-known works look like photos of newsstands and famous paintings. But as one looks closer, the artist's body emerges, painted head-to-toe to blend in with his surroundings. It's like when Duchamp scribbled R. Mutt on his famous urinal and deemed it art, except for Bolin forces his audience to contemplate mundane objects and scenarios in a fine art context by inserting himself into these scenes. The theme of disappearance is fundamental here, as Bolin chooses subjects that highlight the hidden ills often cloaked in attractive packaging and glossy images. His latest solo show, "A Colorful World?" at Klein Sun Gallery is decidedly politically charged.
Erik Johansson disrupts the quiet stillness of life in the countryside with images of idyllic scenes gone awry. His photography borders on photo illustration, as Johansson takes great liberties with his imaginative editing. In one piece called Land Fall, for instance, a field drops off into an abyss like a waterfall, leaving a small cottage on its precipice. In other works, Johansson muddles the distinction between indoors and outdoors, creating optical illusions that play with our understanding of space. In addition to working on his personal projects, Johansson is a commercial photographer and the highly-polished look of his commissioned work comes through in his fine art.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List