YaPhoto was born from the desire to encourage the emergence of new aesthetics around the contemporary image in Cameroon and more particularly in the city of Yaounde. YaPhoto strives to promote the creativity of the Cameroonian art scene by giving exposure to emerging photographers and video artists.
Conscious of the stakes of the image and the transformations prescribed by the digital, the festival questions the aesthetic and cultural mutations of our societies influenced by the new forms of images and their diffusion.
YaPhoto is also conceived as a platform from which professionals and amateurs are invited to rethink the status of the image and its exploitation in all its aspects.
YaPhoto Festival aims to sustain and support the visibility of this scene nationally and internationally. The first two pilot editions What we see (2016) and Picturing the Present (2017) curated by Christine Eyene have given the impetus to an inventory of artistic photography in Cameroon.
This 3rd edition is placed under the theme of Remanences and is dedicated to Bisi Silva (1962-2019), committed curator who has constantly carried photography in Africa to new horizons.
Remanencesquestion the relevance of images as a tools for investigating the world’s mutations. This new edition marks a desire to look at current photographic practices and to renew the perception of the image. Remanence, literally, evokes the phenomenon by which a visual imprint remains, even after its disappearance, in our retina and in our memory. By extension, this concept can also be associated with places where vestiges and stigmas of the past survive.
Remanences is part of a visual persistence based on a deep questioning of the history of images, related to the absence of visual history speci c to Cameroon. Photography has this reminding power sometimes specular. Are our eyes not lost in mythologies?
Text by Yves Chatap
Festival Director: Landry MBASSI
Art Director: Yves CHATAP
Assistant Artistic Director: Sarah DAUPHINÉ TCHOUATCHA
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
PHOTOGRAPHY
Mbadimma CHINEMELUM (Nigeria), Nicolás COMBARRO (Spain), Sarah DAUPHINÉ TCHOUATCHA (France/Cameroon), Blaise DJILO (Cameroon), Lionel Richy EBONGUE (Cameroon), Chantal EDIE and Zacharie NGNOGUE (Cameroon), William GAYE (France), Delio JASSE (Angola), Ditoma KADOULE (Togo), John KALAPO (Mali), M’hammed KILITO (Morocco), Daniel KUKLA (USA), Wilfried NAKEU and Chaima ZAARFOURI (Cameroon, France/Morocco), Pierre Ndjami Makanda (Cameroon), Alain POLO (DRC), Georges TANKAM (Cameroon) and Sibusiso TLHABADIRA (South Africa).
VIDÉO
Megan-Leigh HEILING (South Africa)
Max MBAKOP (Cameroon)
Yvon NGASSAM (Cameroon)
YaPhoto Festival 2019
13 – 31 March 2019
Multiple venues
Yaounde, Cameroon
www.facebook.com/YaPhotoFestival/
Image: ©M’hammed Kilito, Cinéma Camera, 2018
