The Power of Image Archives in Reimagining History

In the 21st century, our understanding of the role of photography in propaganda and the maintenance of power structures has become increasingly nuanced. The digital age, with its proliferation of manipulated and staged images, has heightened our awareness of how photographs have been used to shape public perception and reinforce ideological narratives. This has led to a widespread skepticism toward images as objective records of truth, particularly when they are employed in the service of propaganda.

Image archives hold immense potential to reshape our understanding of history. This current distrust in the historical use of images—especially in the contexts of propaganda, war, domination, conquest, colonialism, and patriarchy—provides us with an opportunity to revisit the past through a more critical lens. Artists like Joana Choumali, Cai Dongdong, and Lebohang Kganye employ artistic, phenomenological, and iconoclastic strategies in their engagement with both personal and researched archives, challenging conventional narratives and offering new interpretations.

In this way, image archives do not merely preserve history; they actively participate in its ongoing construction and reconstruction, compelling us to reconsider what we think we know about the past.

In this conversation, we will explore how these artists construct and deconstruct history through their formalistic artistic strategies, fostering a deeper dialogue on the power of images in shaping—and reshaping—our collective memory.

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

Joana Choumali, born in 1974, is a visual artist/photographer based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She studied graphic arts in Casablanca (Morocco) and worked as an artistic director in an advertising agency before embarking on a career as a photographer. She works mainly on conceptual portraiture, mixed media and documentary photography. Much of her work focuses on what she learns about the countless cultures around her. In her latest works, Joana Choumali embroiders directly on the images completing the act of creating the photographic image with a slow and meditative gesture. In 2014, she won the Cap Prize Award and the Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award 2014. In 2016, she received the Magnum Emergency Grant Foundation and the Fourthwall Books Award in South Africa. In 2017, she exhibited her series “Translation” and “Adorn” at the Ivory Coast Pavilion during the 57th Venice International Biennale. On November 13, 2019, she became the first African winner of the Prix Pictet for her series “Ça va aller” on the theme of this cycle, “Hope”. Her work has been published in the international press: CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, El Pais, Le Monde, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Harper Bazaar Art, The Financial Times etc. Her book HAABRE, was published and edited in Johannesburg in 2016. Her book “Ça va aller” was published in 2022 by Nazraeli press, USA

She was named a 2020 Robert Gardner Fellow in photography by the Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnology, at Harvard University in the United States.

Her work is included in collections such as the Leridon Collection, in Paris, the Museum of Photography in St Louis - Senegal, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Tiroche Deleon Collection, in Israel, the Carla and Pieter Schulting Collection in Pais Bottom, the Collection of the Fondation H in Paris and Antananarivo, the MACAAL Museum of Contemporary African Art in Al Maaden – Marrakech, Harry David Art Collection in Greece, the Prix Pictet Collection in Switzerland. In the United States her work is included in the collections of the Harvard Art Museum in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum (MET) in New York and the High Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta

Credits : © Hussein Makke

Cai Dongdong was born in 1978 in Gansu province, China. He studied at Beijing Film Academy in 2002. Using photography, installation, and video as the main creative media, Cai aimed at the complex cultural issues behind photography, and brought “photography” into the field of image history or cartographic history from the perspective of visual culture, discussing the issues including the presentation of presentation, and the power of viewing. Currently, he lives and works in Beijing, China, and Berlin, Germany. In 2024 his work is cataloged in The Routledge Guide to Global Photographies; in 2018, New York Times reviewed Cai Dongdong as one of the eight brilliant artists in the field of directing the creative ways of photography in the future; in 2022, the 2nd China Golden Panda Photography Art Award honors him as “Outstanding Photographic Artist”. 

His photography book History of Life was published in 2021 and Left Right in 2022. Cai Dongdong’s works have been presented in various museums and institutions, including Galerie Urs Meile Switzerland, “A Game Of Photos” solo exhibition (2024, Switzerland); EUROPEAN MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY, Villaheike berlin, “Obstacles” solo exhibition (2023, Berlin,Germany ); Light-society Image Art Center, “Miss the Target” solo exhibition (2023, Beijing, China); Goslarer Museum (2021, Goslarer, Germany); Museum für Fotografie (2017, Berlin, Germany); Taikang Space (2016, Beijing, China); Minsheng Art Museum (2016, Shanghai, China); Three Shadows Photography Art Center (2015, Beijing, China); CAFA Art Museum (2015, Beijing, China); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2015, Niigata, Japan); Museum Folkwang (2015, Essen, Germany); Pace Beijing (2014, Beijing, China); He Xiangning Art Museum (2014, Shenzhen, China); National Art Museum of China (2011, Beijing, China); UNIDEE Foundation (2011, Turin, Italy); Guangdong Museum of Art (2005, Guangzhou, China), etc.

Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. Kganye is currently completing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University; she studied Fine Arts at the University of Johannesburg (2016); and Photography at the Market Photo Workshop (2011).

She is the recipient of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize, 2024 for her exhibition Haufi Nyana? I’ve Come to Take you Home, which took place at Foam, Amsterdam (2023). Other notable recent awards include the Foam Paul Huf Award, 2022, Grand Prix Images Vevey, 2021/22; and Camera Austria Award, 2019.

Kganye’s recent solo exhibitions with newly commissioned work include Shall you Return Everything, but the Burden, Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne, Germany (2023) and Dipina tsa Kganya: Leave the Light on When You Leave for Good, Georgian House Museum, Bristol, UK (2022). A two-person exhibition Tell Me What You Remember with Kganye and Sue Williamson was recently presented by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (2023).

Recent touring group exhibitions include David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive, Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024-25); Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Photographers’ Gallery, London and The Cube, Frankfurt (2024); A World in Common, Tate Museum, London and Wereld Museum, Rotterdam (2023-24); and As We Rise, by Aperture, Art Museum, University of Toronto, Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem and Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax (2022-24). 

Azu Nwagbogu is an internationally acclaimed curator, interested in evolving new models of engagement with questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation. In his practice, the exhibition becomes an experimental site for reflection, civic engagement, ecology and repatriation – both tangible and symbolic. Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non- profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria. He also serves as Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival, an annual international arts festival of photography held in Lagos. He is the publisher of Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas. In 2021, Nwagbogu was awarded “Curator of Year 2021” by the Royal Photographic Society, UK, and also listed amongst the hundred most influential people in the art world by ArtReview.

In 2021, Nwagbogu launched the project “Dig Where You Stand (DWYS) - From Coast to Coast” which offers a new model for institutional building and engagement, with questions of decolonization, restitution and repatriation, the exhibition took place in Ibrahim’s Mahama’s culture hub SCCA in Tamale, Ghana. In 2023, Nwagbogu was appointed “Explorer at Large” by National Geographic Society to serve as an ambassador for the Organization and receive support to continue his storytelling work across Africa and globally, a title bestowed on a select few global change makers. Most recently in 2024, Nwagbogu curated the first ever Benin Pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale. Nwagbogu’s primary interest is in reinventing the idea of the museum and its role as a civic space for engagement for society at large

Credits : © Anastasia Ermolenko