Mallam Mudi Yahaya

Visited the IAS from March to April, 2023

Mallam Mudi Yahaya is a visual artist whose work explores interpretations of African hybrid identities and their varied visual dialects, currencies, and vocabularies. With the massive digitization of media data, Mudi investigates aesthetics that connect postcolonial, post-global African identities mediated by still photography and cinema linked with politics, philosophy, history, time, religion, power, violence, intolerance, gender, and race matters. Mudi’s work further focuses on the relationship and tension between images as they interact with notions and strategies of post-colonial deconstruction and decolonization of the African identity in syncretic African spaces and non-spaces. Mudi’s interest in identity extends to photography archives, where he conceptually explores counter-narratives of photographic construction and representation that delve into the relationship between the photo archive and the idea of a nation and national identity. His conceptual archival projects are conceived from the performativity and multimodality of photography archives, which present archival photos as a visual resource that influences semiotic construction with socio-cultural meaning.

His work has been presented for decades in many museums, galleries, and festivals in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Most recently, his solo exhibition ECOAR Reflecting The African Shadow Of Memory extended to REVERBERAÇÕES Reflecting The African Impression Of Memory (2023 / 2024) opened at the National Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture in Salvador de Bahía. With this work, the contemporary artist Mallam Mudi Yahaya traces the question of how African societies that were at the center of the transatlantic slave trade were, directly and indirectly, influenced over the centuries in ways that affected how these societies organized themselves intellectually, socially, culturally, and philosophically.

While visiting the IAS, Mallam Mudi Yahaya presented AL'UMMA  Society Celebrating Life a photography exhibition of the photographs of Nina Fischer-Stephan and himself that aimed to broaden the visual understanding of the social and representational meaning of the most dominant culture of northern Nigeria.

Mallam Mudi Yahaya also as Artist In The Archive at Iwalewahaus undertook the project Shape, Meaning, the Archive, and Me that looked into photography and film as forms of human artifacts and historical evidence that added another layer of form to forms that have already been “molded” for humans to perceive. The project's thesis was based on the logic that photographs and films are a perfect representation of Gestalt perception because they have a form that is simultaneously predetermined by the medium and imagined by the viewer. Thus, when viewing a photograph or watching a film, the “whole” is perceived before the parts, the general pattern before the specific details, as with all Gestalts. This suggests that as with the well-known illusion of the Kanizsa triangle, which is only defined by the items surrounding it, features are frequently "filled in" by the mind without being seen or even occasionally without truly existing all anchored in core Gestalt ideas about the multimodal functioning of the senses.

According to Mallam Mudi Yahaya, one of the outstanding highlights of working at the IAS was the privilege of engaging with diverse archival collections which offered opportunities for creative exploration, research, and collaboration across diverse fields of study and by so doing contribute to innovative projects and initiatives.