The Board of La Biennale di Venezia, presided over by Davide Croff, has
accepted the proposal by Director Robert Storr to award the Golden Lion for
Lifetime Achievement of the 52nd International Art Exhibition (10th June 21st
November) to the artist Malick Sidibé (Soloba, Mali, 1936).
The Golden Lion will be awarded in Venice on Sunday, June 10th, first day of
the Exhibition, during a brief ceremony at the Giardini della Biennale which
will follow the official opening at 10.30 a.m.
Statement and recommendation by the Director of the 52nd International Art
Exhibition, Robert Storr
Photography has been perhaps the most widely and inventively used artistic
medium in Africa in the post- colonial era, as a spate of recent exhibitions has
clearly shown. As they have also demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt, no
African artist has done more to enhance photography’s stature in the region,
contribute to its history, enrich its image archive or increase our awareness of
the textures and transformations of African culture in the second half of the
twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first than Malick Sidibé.
Operating primarily from a small studio on one of the busiest streets of
central Bamako, the capital of Mali, Sidibé has been the signal portraitist of
his city and nation and the intimate observer of the Malian musical scene. Like
August Sander, the great German photographer, he has preserved the likenesses of
countless individuals while in the process recording the face of the rapidly
changing society they, as citizens, have collectively brought into being.
For the 52nd Biennale of 2007 Sidibé has joined forces with the organizers of
the project “Les Africains Chantent Contre le SIDA/Africans Sing Against AIDS”
to take pictures of the contestants in a countrywide competition for singers and
song writers who composed and performed works in Mali’s various languages
designed to provide information about the disease, its prevention and its
treatment. The unique presence of each of the contestants is the fruit of a
collaboration between the subject and the photographer, a collaboration subtly
guided by his unfailing tact and captured by his acute eye. At 72, Malick Sidibé
is the undisputed master of his photographic generation. No artists anywhere is
more deserving of the 2007 Biennale of Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime
Achievement, and none more worthy of being the first African so honored.
