This work forms part of Atong Atem’s Studio series (2015), which comprises portraits of young black African subjects, the photographer’s friends, who share her experience within the African diaspora in Australia. Atem sees the production of these portraits as collaborative acts. They draw strongly upon the practices of mid-twentieth-century West-African photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, borrowing from their studio techniques, backdrops and poses. While these photographers’ careers straddled Mali’s colonial history and path to independence, Atem assimilates their methods towards an active agenda of decolonisation. Playful and spontaneous in their making, the props and backdrops in these images echo the appearance of photographs the artist says are often possessed by African (in particular her own South Sudanese) families. Embedded in these images, however, are cultural and political narratives for the viewer to unpick. The batik fabrics that fill Atem’s improvised studio sets with bright colours, often interpreted as tropes of traditional African dress, are in fact traditional Indonesian patterns, present on the continent only as a result of Dutch colonial trade routes and markets. As such these works at once reclaim, redefine and celebrate contemporary African identity in a post-colonial cultural landscape.

(2020)