Images

« The ENVOY : But have things ever hap­pened other­wise? History was lived so that a glo­rious page might be written, and then read. It’s reading that counts. (To the pho­tog­ra­phers) Gentlemen, the Queen informs me that she con­grat­u­lates you. She asks that you return to your posts. » Jean Genet, Le Balcon, 1956

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

The Day After takes root in Maryam Jafri’s ongoing pro­ject Independence Day 1934-1975 (2009-pre­sent), an instal­la­tion com­posed of pho­tographs taken on the first inde­pen­dence day in former European colonies across Asia and Africa between 1934 and 1975.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », View of Maryam Jafri "Independence Day 1934-75", 2009 - ongoing, at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », detail of Maryam Jafri "Independence Day 1934-75", 2009 - ongoing, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », detail of Maryam Jafri, "Independence Day 1934-75", 2009 - ongoing, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », detail of Maryam Jafri, "Independence Day 1934-75", 2009 - ongoing, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

The photos are sourced from the coun­tries them­selves (in order to high­light, in the artist’s words, “how post-colo­nial states in Asia and Africa pre­serve the founding images of their incep­tion as inde­pen­dent nations”) and dis­play striking sim­i­lar­i­ties despite dis­parate geo­graph­ical and tem­poral ori­gins, revealing a polit­ical model exported from Europe and in the pro­cess of being cloned throughout the world.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », detail of Maryam Jafri, "Independence Day 1934-75", 2009 - ongoing, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Malagasy his­to­rian Helihanta Rajaonarison inter­viewed Malagasy cit­i­zens who lived through the events sur­rounding Madagascar’s inde­pen­dence. Their sto­ries, far removed from the offi­cial image of the pho­tographs, reveal the com­plex and varied way in which these events were per­ceived, brought back to life through the prism of the pho­tographs.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », detail of Helihanta Rajaonarison, photographs from ANTA fund, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », detail of Helihanta Rajaonarison, photographs from ANTA fund, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

“One more thing,” states French writer, poet and play­wright Jean Genet in How to Stage The Balcony. “This play is not to be staged as if it were a satire of this or that. It is—and will there­fore be played as—the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the Image and the Reflection. Its meaning, satir­ical or other­wise, will appear only in this case.”

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

One inde­pen­dence may hide another... A funny yet bitter tale, Toba Tek Singh was the last short story written by Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto,who was born in British India in 1912 and died in Pakistan in 1955. A thinly veiled crit­i­cism of the vio­lence pro­voked by the Partition, the story depicts the trau­matic expe­ri­ence of a man whose iden­tity and home­land are rede­fined against his will.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Saadat Hasan Manto, "Toba Tek Singh", 1955 and "Vrishchik", 1971 (On loan from Bibliothèque Kandinsky, MNAM – CCI), at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

In 1971 the Indian art magazine Vrishchik (founded by artist and critic Gulammohammed Sheikh at the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts in 1969) ded­i­cated an issue to Bangladesh’s struggle for inde­pen­dence from Pakistan.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », view of "Vrishchik", 1971 (On loan from Bibliothèque Kandinsky, MNAM – CCI), at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

“All public archives in Iraq were pre­sumed destroyed in the 2003 inva­sion. In 2012, an American com­pany named Tehrkot Media claimed to have some images of Iraqi inde­pen­dence. The images show King Faisal I of Iraq, in his palace gar­dens, giving an inde­pen­dence speech to a group of British and Iraqi VIPs. In 2014 Tehrkot Media went bankrupt. The site and its images have sub­se­quently dis­ap­peared.” (Maryam Jafri)

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

In the years 2010, the eco­nom­ical sit­u­a­tion of Portugal led the country to call for help from its former colony, Angola, a country with a rich oil industry. This upset­ting of the pre­vious order of things was much debated in the inter­na­tional media.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

This pho­tog­raphy of Pamphile Kasuku, from Jürg Schneider’s book, La présence du passé. Une his­toire de la pho­togra­phie au burundi, 1959-2005 (Bujumbara, 2008) rep­re­sents the murder of the burun­dian prime min­ister Louis Rwagasore the day after inde­pen­dence. The national leaders death — of which the bel­gian gov­ern­ment is sus­pected to be a silent partner — has left ten­sions run between the Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », View of Jürg Schneider, "Présence du Passé" (Bujumbura, 2008), at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

In 1960, a wave of decol­o­niza­tion took place in Subsaharian Africa. Fourteen coun­tries became inde­pen­dent, often fol­lowing peaceful agree­ments. Students from the Master I Scientific Journalism, Culture and Communication, Paris Diderot University trace out dif­ferent rep­re­sen­ta­tions of these events.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », contribution by students from the Master I Scientific Journalism, Culture and Communication, Paris Diderot University, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

The bou­quet pre­sented by Kapwani Kiwanga, from her Flowers for Africa series, was recon­sti­tuted from a pho­tograph of the cer­e­mony of inde­pen­dence of the Federation in June, dis­playing a choir of young singers holding flowers in their hand. Flowers for Africa com­prises sev­eral floral com­po­si­tions linked to inde­pen­dence cer­e­monies in former euro­pean colonies in Africa. Recreated by Kapwani Kiwanga from pho­tographs, these bou­quets evoke - by metonymy - the way trans­fers of powers were staged during inde­pen­dence days. They also enact an anachro­nistic and per­for­ma­tive rela­tion­ship to the absent doc­u­ments that inspired them.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », view of Kapwani Kiwanga, "Flowers for Africa, Federation of Mali", 2012, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Misattributed pho­tographs taken by Maryam Jafri at the Jordan National Library and the Kuwait National Oil Company

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015. Misattributed photographs from Kuweit and Jordan gathered by Maryam Jafri, © Aurélien Mole.

Franck Komlan Ogou (archivist, cul­tural he- ritage expert, head of pro­gram and pro­fessor at the Ecole du Patrimoine Africain in Porto Novo, Benin) has spent years working on the preser­va­tion of pho­to­graphic archival col­lec­tions in Benin. He shares for this exhi­bi­tion a visual tes­ti­mony and a con­ser­va­tion pro­ject.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

“Re­cently, while browsing the Getty Images web­site, I real­ized that I had already seen sev­eral his­tor­ical pho­tographs from Ghana that Getty Images had copy­righted at the archives of the Ghana Ministry of Information. The specific images claimed by both Ghana and Getty were not just any images but rather Ghana inde­pen­dence pho­tographs from March 6th, 1957 – doc­u­ments of the first instance of lib­er­a­tion of sub-Saharan Africa from Western rule. » (Maryam Jafri)

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », view of Maryam Jafri, "Getty vs. Ghana", 2012 at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

S.N.S. Sastry worked as a cam­eraman for the Film Divisions, a gov­ern­mental orga­ni­za­tion self-described as ‘the offi­cial infor­ma­tion organ of India’. He made the film I Am 20 to com­mem­o­rate the twen­tieth year of Indian inde­pen­dence (1967), in which he inter­views a series of people born in 1947 about their rela­tion­ship to the idea of India.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

A video, a pub­li­ca­tion and a sculp­ture pro­duced by Soufiane Ababri and the par­tic­i­pants of ate­lier Denis Diderot com­pose a diary of their attempts to “enter his­tory” through a series of actions that are as many efforts to resist the manip­u­la­tion of his­tory, to speak rather than being spoken.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », view of Soufiane Ababri "Des tentatives invérifiables de rentrer dans l’histoire", 2015, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », view of Soufiane Ababri "Des tentatives invérifiables de rentrer dans l’histoire", 2015 at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Researchers Dominique Malaquais and Cédric Vincent and the stu­dents of the Master I Scientific Journalism, Culture and Communication Paris Diderot University traced out the many paths taken by the FESTAC mask allowing a new, richly polit­ical per­spec­tive on, a key moment in the Pan-African euphoria that fol­lowed the end of colo­nial rule.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », contribution by Dominique Malaquais, Cédric Vincent and students from the Master I module in Journalism, Culture and Scientific Communication of Université Paris Diderot, at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

The con­tri­bu­tions, emerging from the work of par­tic­i­pants in the artist’s research over the last few years or invited by Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, seek to trigger a re-exam­i­na­tion not only of the pho­tographs them­selves—the con­text in which they were pro­duced and the his­tor­ical nar­ra­tives attached to them, but also of their cur­rent status, to do with prob­lems of con­ser­va­tion, high­lighting prop­erty and inter­na­tional issues; and finally of the geopo­lit­ical and cul­tural upheaval caused by the events they depict.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.

Maryam Jafri, « The Day After », Exhibition view at Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research, Paris, 2015 © Aurélien Mole.