Receiving international recognition over the past four decades Abdoulaye Konaté has established himself as a leading artist of his generation. He is also a committed educator in his role as Founding General Director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasseké Kouyaté in Bamako, the city where he still lives and works.
Read MoreAdopting a unique process of assemblage, Konaté cuts-up, dyes, sews, and reassembles pieces of fabric (mostly cotton), then reconfigures them into large-scale, boldly coloured tapestries with incredibly detailed surfaces, creating arresting optical effects.
Working mostly with textile materials, dyes, and dyeing techniques indigenous to his native Mali, Konaté's installations form abstract visual tableaus which are at once explorations in colour and weaving cloth yet speak to more complicated global socio-political themes that resonate far beyond his local context.
In early works on paper rendered in acrylic, colourful motifs refer to graphic signs and cosmological symbols used by Malian societies, the most prominent of these being ciwara (or amulets)—a ritual object representing an antelope head, used by the Bambara ethnic group in Mali. The head of the beast, which typically forms part of a zoomorphic crest with elegant lines, evokes the graceful ripple of an antelopes form and is an important symbol used in masks worn to perform traditional dance and rituals of initiation.
Colour in Konaté's work isn't merely aesthetic and serves as a metaphor for themes as diverse as war, power struggles, religion, globalisation, ecological shifts, and the AIDS epidemic which he poignantly visualised in his 1995 work Lutte contre de HIV. This large textile work depicts a figure with an imposing red target at its centre, suggestive of being marked by illness, accompanied by a suitcase placed in front, containing three screenprints and a blanket referencing personal artefacts and ephemera related to the suffering brought on by the disease.
As the artist has previously said of his influences, 'I can say that in my art there are two well-defined lines of thought. On the one hand, there is the purely aesthetic side, influenced by the nature and cultural traditions of Mali, my country, and that determines the colours and the materials of my work. On the other hand, there is a more spiritual side, which stems from the desire to investigate and describe through my work the human suffering, which reflects itself on the relations between states, politics, the environment, society and the family. Addressing very urgent issues such as AIDS, fanatism and environmental threats, my works draw attention to the problems that plague the modern man and that are caused by a fundamental lack of tolerance in Africa as elsewhere in the world.'
