Abstract

Omar Victor Diop’s project entitled Diaspora (2014-15) is a series of large, brightly coloured photographs in which the artist poses revisiting little-known or famous portraits (such as Juan de Pareja by Velázquez or Jean-Baptiste Belley by Girodet), turning them into self-portraits. What unites them is the fact that the characters portrayed are Africans both illustrious and eccentric, who from the 16th to the 19th century distinguished themselves outside their own country by becoming and being perceived as ‘others’. The addition of accessories from the game of football gives an ironic and mocking tone to the staging, suggesting that today’s young Africans are mainly dependent on sport to be accepted in a globalised world still governed by colonialist perceptions. These studio self-portraits are emblematic of a new African photography that unfolds a reflection on identity aimed at overturning stereotypes by drawing on visual codes not specifically African. And Diop seems to emphasise that Africa has not only had a history, but has contributed to the world’s history in often unpredictable ways: a history written mainly by non-African imagery, reinvented by the artist in order to make his own the lives of his predecessors. Thus Diop’s project is a discourse on the historical identity of Africans, who, either willingly or unwillingly, discover the other within themselves. But it is also an apologue on the visual conventions that construct people in their historical depth and through their images