BIOGRAPHY
Fatoumata Diabaté is a Malian photographer, she lives and works between Montpellier and Bamako. Attracted by portraiture and humanist and social photography, her images have as their main subject women and young generations in Mali. Oral tradition, beliefs, the question of transmission are at the heart of his work. Everyday objects, improvised masks and clothing become in his portraits the symbolic vectors of a living common memory that is constantly reinvented. Fatoumata Diabaté also developed the project Le studio photo de la rue , by reconstituting a mobile and urban studio in the vein of Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta. Claiming her artistic heritage, she pays homage, with humor and lightness, to the Malian photographic repertoire. After studying photography at the Promo femmes audiovisual training center and at the CFP in Bamako from 2002 to 2004, she was then a technician in the film laboratory of the CFP until 2009. In 2014 and 2015, she benefited from a scholarship at the Nancy’s ENSA. His work has been the subject of several exhibitions in Mali, France and internationally, notably at the Blachère Foundation (2012), at the Muséum national du Havre (2017), at the Hong Museum in Chengdu and at the Shuter Art Space in Guangzhou (2019). Fatoumata Diabaté also took part in the Bamako Photography Biennale (2009, 2011), the Voies off festival in Arles (2018), the Dakar Biennale (2018) as well as the La Gacilly Photo Festival (2017). Since December 2017, she has been president of the association of women photographers of Mali. In 2021, she is the winner of the Photographic Residencies at the Musée du Quai Branly.
