Abdoulaye Konaté

Biography

In 1978 Abdoulaye Konaté, a graduate of the Institut National des Arts in Bamako, went to study in Cuba and spent seven years in Havana. There he graduated from the Higher Institute of Art and discovered multidisciplinary art, the kind that does not hold on to a single material. The impression proved a lasting one.

He was born on 1 February 1953 in Diré, a small town in the north of Mali, and he first studied painting at home, in Bamako, from 1972 to 1976.

After returning from Cuba in 1985, Konaté worked as a graphic designer at the National Museum in Bamako and painted in acrylic. In the 1990s he gave up conventional easel painting. He worked with tapestry, sewing, painting and sculpture, but he made cloth his main material: his large wall hangings and installations are assembled from it. Cloth is also easier to come by than paint. He takes his themes from life in Mali and from the world news, and he also looks for inspiration in African spiritual traditions. Two themes run through many of his works: the desert’s advance on the Sahel and what AIDS does to society and to the individual. Alongside them come wars, ecology, human rights and globalisation. I think cloth suits such subjects well: it is the material of everyday life, and talk of drought or epidemic does not seem abstract when it is carried by fabric.

In 1996 he won the Grand Prix of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar. A year later his work was shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, in an exhibition of contemporary art from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in 1998 he took part in the 24th São Paulo Biennial. From 2004 to 2007 his works travelled with the exhibition “Africa Remix” to Düsseldorf, London, Paris (the Centre Pompidou), Tokyo, Stockholm and Johannesburg; in 2007 he was among the participants in Documenta 12 in Kassel. In 2008 he was shortlisted for the Welsh Artes Mundi prize, and the National Museum Cardiff showed, among other pieces, his works “Les Marcheurs” (The Walkers) and “Tafo ou la force du verbe” (Tafo, or the Power of the Word). That same year he took part in the 7th Gwangju Biennale, and in 2009 he was back in Havana, this time as a participant in the 10th Havana Biennial. He has had solo exhibitions in Munich (1999), Heidelberg (2009) and Milan (2013); in 2011 the Institute of International Visual Arts in London commissioned a work from him for its window.

From 1998 Konaté directed the Palais de la Culture in Bamako, and later he became head of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasséké Kouyaté there. In 2002 he was made a Knight of the National Order of Mali and of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

Books have been written about him: in 2011 the Malian Ministry of Culture and the National Gallery in Dakar published a study of his canvases by Joëlle Busca, and in 2016 a monograph appeared, prepared by a London gallery and the Arken museum in Denmark. Konaté lives and works in Bamako.