Q&A with Azu Nwagbogu

Joana Choumali, My Home is in My Head, 2024 - Courtesy of the artist & Loft Art

Through your concept 'Liberated Bodies', you invite us to challenge the subjectivity of the archive. How do the artists you selected use archival material to liberate photography from its conventional role?

Cai Dongdong's work is based on found photographic archives that circumscribe the history of modern China. The half-century from 1949 to 1989, in China had some of the most consequential events that influenced the world with its failed utopias and monomaniacal errant of human intervention in which had a devastating impact on ecology and human lives. Today we speak of the Anthropocene but the decay, I would argue, started with the wars of conquest and colonialism that defined the previous century. Yet so little is known of these monumental events. Dongdong's work is not photography as evidence or with comments on jurisprudence, it rather is a powerful impulse of an artist towards a reflection of that period in humanities history.

The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, and the Sino-Soviet relations of the last Century, which today takes on an inverted form in our century. These are all very interesting from a visual history perspective. 

Joana Choumali’s work is also based on the archives but in her case, a personal familial archive, that pays homage to her journey as an empath in a vicious violent world. One often hears of work being cathartic, in Joana Choumali’s it is vitally true. Choumali stitches and weaves memories and histories through her “radioactive” stitching intervention on the photographic prints.

Lebohang Kganye, is the latest winner of the prestigious Deutsche Börse photographic prize. Her work is based on a retelling of South Africa’s troubled past through various sculptural photographic interventions. 

I do not want to give too much away but I am very excited to see this edition of Paris Photo Fair.