CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Harvard Art Museums, in partnership with Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, present a new body of work by Ivorian multimedia photographic artist Joana Choumali. Conceived and created as part of the artist’s non-residential 2020 Robert Gardner Photography Fellowship at the Peabody Museum, the series Yougou-Yougou comprises 13 photographic tapestries that explore the cultural, environmental, and political economies of the international circulation of mass-produced clothing. The series is now on view for the first time in the exhibition Joana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces (January 25–May 11, 2025), in the University Research Gallery on Level 3 of the Harvard Art Museums. All in-gallery materials are presented bilingually, in English and French, the official language of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). The artist will give a public talk at Harvard on April 10, 2025. All works in the exhibition are presented courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater.
Born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where she lives and works, Joana Choumali (b. 1974) took the clothing worn and sold in local markets there and in Ghana as the inspiration for Yougou-Yougou (a Malinké phrase for secondhand clothing that means “shaken or stirred”). The port cities of West Africa are a primary destination for castoff T-shirts and other “fast fashion” items that have been discarded by the United States and Europe. As a multilingual artist trained in graphic design, Choumali noticed the prominence of bold English-language text and idiomatic puns on many of the T-shirts worn by laborers in and visitors to the marketplaces she visited. With the assistance of translators who could bridge French and the varied regional languages spoken in the markets, she spoke with and photographed individuals in the markets who agreed to participate in her work. She asked her participants to share their thoughts about their shirts and discovered a dissonance between the graphic slogans—many associated with gendered identities or niche cultural communities—and the lives of the people wearing them.
The exhibition features 12 life-size, hand-quilted and embroidered composite portraits of the various participants she photographed, as well as a busy scene from the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana—one of the world’s largest depots for secondhand clothing—that provides a large mural backdrop to the portraits. The positioning of the portraits throughout the gallery in front of the mural creates a sense of encounter while walking through a marketplace. Excerpts from Choumali’s conversations accompany each composite portrait in the exhibition, reflecting her ongoing commitment to deep engagement with and representation of her local community through her artwork.
Joana Choumali: Languages of West African Marketplaces was curated by Ilisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, and Mitra Abbaspour, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums; with Bridget Hinz, Senior Curatorial Assistant for Special Exhibitions and Publications, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums.
Choumali’s detailed process for the Yougou-Yougou series included scanning her photographs, matching the skin tone of various individuals, and creating a digital composite of their faces, so that the facial appearance of each portrait is made up of multiple people. She then digitally printed her portraits, including snippets of stalls and scenes from the marketplaces, onto fabric, which she then cut into pieces and reassembled with layers of tulle, printed textiles, batting, and cotton canvas to create quilted tableaus in mixed media. Finally, she accentuated each piece with hand-stitching that adds texture and volume, giving each work a physical presence. With these techniques—stitching, quilting, and custom tailoring—Choumali reverses the “fast fashion” economy of the T-shirts’ manufacture and market, instead investing the expendable garments worn by the individuals she photographs with the time, attention, and care usually reserved for luxury and ceremonial clothing. She has described this stitching as an act of repair.
In a short video produced for and shown within the exhibition, Choumali shares her process in her own words along with clips of her interviews with participants in the markets and her work back in the studio. The video, subtitled in French, is also available to view on YouTube and Vimeo.
“We are thrilled to show this new series of works by Joana Choumali, who was unanimously selected for the Peabody Museum’s Robert Gardner Photography Fellowship in 2020 for her innovative approach to photography,” said Ilisa Barbash. “As a visual anthropologist, I see the ways in which she bridges the seemingly vast distance between an Ivory Coast port city and Cambridge, MA, and how she reminds us of the ways we’re all connected through commerce by highlighting the multivarious ways we all regard consumer goods and cultural messages.”
Mitra Abbaspour continued: “Choumali invites audiences to consider the significance of the movement of excess garments across our planet and calls attention to the implications of global exchange, resource management, environmental degradation, and the legacies of colonialism that play out in the economy of imported secondhand clothing in West African markets.”
Programs accompanying the exhibition include an in-person artist talk by Joana Choumali, who will discuss her practice, inspirations, and artistic exploration of her hometown, Abidjan, with exhibition co-curators Ilisa Barbash and Mitra Abbaspour on Thursday, April 10 at 6pm. A Materials Lab Workshop on visible mending led by local artist Jessamy Shay will be held on Sunday, March 30, 11am–2pm. Additionally, 30-minute gallery talks led by various contributors to the exhibition will be held throughout the run of the exhibition. The gallery talks all begin at 12:30pm on the following dates: Tuesday, March 25, Wednesday, April 9, Tuesday, April 15, Wednesday, April 23, Tuesday, April 29, Saturday, May 10, and Sunday, May 11. The above programs will be held in person at the Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, and will be conducted in English. Admission to visit the exhibition is free, but some programs have a fee and/or require registration. For full details, updates, and to register, please click the links above or see our calendar: harvardartmuseums.org/calendar. Questions? Call 617-495-9400.
Joanna Choumali’s work has been exhibited in Abidjan at the Musée des Civilisations de Côte d’Ivoire, Fondation Donwahi pour l’Art Contemporain, La Rotonde des Arts, and Palais de la Culture. In the United States, her work has been presented in solo exhibitions in 2022 and 2024 at Sperone Westwater, New York. She has also shown her work at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town; and in the 2017 and 2024 editions of the Venice Biennale. In 2014, she received the POPCAP prize for Contemporary African Photography and a LensCulture Award for Emerging Talent. In 2016, she received a Magnum Emergency Fund grant for her Sisi Barra (Smoke Work) series and the Fourthwall Books Award to publish her series Hââbré: The Last Generation. She is the first African recipient of the Prix Pictet, an annual honor for photography and sustainability, which she was awarded in 2019 for her series Ça va aller.
Two embroidered photographs by Choumali were acquired by the Harvard Art Museums in 2022: And It Will Keep on Growing (2020) and Sometimes, I Count My Blinks (2021). These works can be viewed, by appointment, through the museums’ Art Study Center.
