In the Darkness that Grows Lighter: Ibrahima Thiam’s Spirits

“Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.”

Birago Diop, Breaths, 1960

Since its inception, photography was presented and praised as the technology that could finally make visible what the naked eye could not see. Whether it was the distant body of the moon, or the tiniest bone hidden under our skin, photography has since shown the world as it had never been seen before. Ibrahima Thiam (b. 1976) proposes a new, different question: is photography only about seeing—better and more clearly? Can it, perhaps, make us unsee the world? Can it make us sense the visible, and invisible, beyond our eyes?  

First trained in photography in 2009, Ibrahima Thiam has over the past 15 years developed an artistic practice that is as expansive in its aesthetics, as focused as he hones his—and our—ability to perceive the world before and beyond our eyes’ reach. Thiam has moved across media and methods—from the photographic darkroom to open-air installations, from archival interventions to sonic landscapes—all whilst remaining rooted in history, as the sole possibility to chart new imaginaries. For Thiam, to look back is to search for African endogenous vocabularies and cosmologies, that is, local practices of working with and making sense of the in/visible.[i] He offers us, his viewers, an opportunity to see beyond our eyes.

Thiam’s exploration of sight emerged since his first series Reflections (2010), which responded to floodings in his natal Saint Louis.[ii] Rather than taking a documentary approach that shows and denounces, Thiam crafts poetic images that present the city and its inhabitants through their reflections on water puddles. In this series, Thiam renders his beloved city as an apparition, whose surface is riddled and rippling. Saint Louisians are figured as reflections mediated by water and light. Their bodies appear dematerialized, almost ghostly. His photographs upturn and blur planes—that of reality and its reflections—to make palpable natural devastation and human resilience. This early series announces Thiam’s commitment to his immediate environment, but also to an employment of lens-based media, not to show reality-as-is, but to render something deeper, or to use Leopold Sédar Senghor’s words, to render “le sous-reel,” what lies beneath the real.[iii] What if there was more to reality’s appearance?

Starting from 2014, Thiam has embraced the archival as a critical methodology to his practice of excavating the history of making visible and making sense. The archives he has mined are tangible and intangible, private and public, visual and oral, colonial and profoundly personal, because as he explains, each offers the opportunity to revisit and reinterpret one’s history.[iv] In two of his series, Images of Yesterday (2015) and Vintage Series (2016), Thiam uses vintage black-and-white prints from his collection of Senegalese photography of the independence era to reconnect temporalities, aesthetics and subjectivities. In the installation Images of Yesterday, he cites and celebrates the site of the photographic studio with its checkered motifs, and the Saint Louisian bridal photographic rooms known as xoymet as archival forms in themselves.[v]In Vintage Series, he portrays contemporary Senegalese holding black-and-white portraits over their faces to withhold their likeness.[vi] As we look at these images-within-images, we can only wonder: who are these masked sitters if not the image of their ancestors?

The series Maam Coumba Castel presented here for the first time for the Dakar Biennial 2024 is part of Thiam’s larger and ongoing research on endogenous knowledges and on the relation between the visible and the invisible. It was in 2017 that Thiam started researching the Lebou community in Senegal, their cosmologies and healing practices such as the N’döep. As part of this research, Thiam conducted interviews, read books, attended the ritual of the N’döep and consulted the archives at the IFAN in Dakar, where he then designed a site-specific installation titled Aarou maag nii using archival and contemporary photographs.[vii] Eventually Thiam chose to focus on the cult of genies and ancestral spirits (jinn or rab in Wolof), which animate the Lebou cosmology, and are shared with other groups across Senegal, the West African region and the Black Atlantic.[viii]

Thiam has since created four series devoted to distinct spirits and their associated costal town, namely: Maam Coumba Bang in Saint-Louis (2018), Maam Ndeuk Daour Mbaye in Dakar (2020), Maam Njaré Jaw in Yöff (2020), and the latest Maam Coumba Castel in Gorée Island (2024).[ix] For Thiam, they are “invisible spirits and forces who protect their towns and communities, living between the visible and invisible worlds, between land and water. These mystical presences are half-woman, half-man, half-animal.”[x] These beings indeed transform. They exist in the liminal, as they morph, making it impossible to fix them. In front of Thiam’s lens, Maam Ndeuk Daour Mbaye appears with a human-like body, a head of a white horse and gris-gris around the neck. Maam Njaré materializes at times embodied in a fully covered figure; at times, as marked through its absence, in the negative space of a cave, or in the residue of an abandoned calabash. Maam Coumba Castel blurs in its glowing sparkly-red-robe against the dark night sky. Each spirit is presented with distinctive props that recall diverse African aesthetics. Maam Njaré’s coiffure echoes the Saint Louisian Nguuka; her beaded coral-red mask reminds Yoruba royal attire. Maam Coumba Castel’s conical-shaped headdress is reminiscent for its volume of Bamana helmet masks or Bwa leafy headgear.[xi] Such disparate references should not be seen as abstracted or unspecified signs to indicate these figures’ essential Africanness, as found for example in the paintings of the first generation of the École de Dakar.[xii] Rather, these indefinite attributes suggest these spirits’ liminality, that is, their ability to exceed specific categories. What we see, is but their masks.

To photograph these spirits is to ask the impossible: can we see the invisible?  Thiam once stated that, “Thereare people who can see and others who cannot.”[xiii] His series mediate the possibility of an encounter with the spirits. Like in his earlier work, Thiam is not documenting these beings’ existence. Each photograph is not presented as an indexical trace or visual proof of a miraculous embodiment that we can finally all witness. On the contrary, Thiam has stated his desire to “mettre en scène […] leur épopée.”[xiv] And as he stages their mythology, Thiam is not searching for accuracy. He cherishes instead these beings’ ability to “shed light on our way of being in the world.” He explains that these genies invite us to “reflect on ourselves, our relationships, and the world we inhabit.” [xv] As such, these spirits, and by extension their photographs, serve as a mirror for the viewer to reflect on their own experience.

The centrality of orality and performance in Thiam’s oeuvre cannot be overstated. Photography is without-a-doubt his chosen medium, yet, his images—these spirits—are rooted in oral histories, those that are narrated and passed down from generation to generation. As such, his photographs activate the medium’s “citational possibilities,” as they recall and enact “a récit.”[xvi] The photograph becomes a device to remember and reactivate what has been forgotten or has been latent. Similarly, in preparing such performances—as he prepares the script, the props, the costumes, the setting, the actors, the installation—Thiam finds inspiration in the scholarly literature, archives, and first-hand accounts, to eventually “transcend the limits of the archive.”[xvii] Thiam renounces any claim of veracity or realism, which in contrast the colonial power had valued so much. If the colonial gaze confidently, and falsely, claimed that it was showing “the real” in its primitivizing photographs, Thiam is offering a counter narrative, where sight is instead limited and possibly misleading.  We can then speak of Thiam’s dressing the spirits, both as a practice and a metaphor, where artifice is essential to move beyond reality, and its constraints. In fewer words, Thiam is not making the spirits visible, he is asking us to unsee them, and sense them beyond our eyes’ reach.

Curators Okwui Enwezor and Margaret Nagawa have noted the “insistent presence” of the human figure in the contemporary African art, whereby artists have foregrounded the subject’s representation to insist on their existence and humanity.[xviii] If many artists have done so by magnifying the sitters’ likeness through a “surfacist aesthetic” as in Seydou Keïta’s photographs, Ibrahima Thiam has explored a distinct new path.[xix]In Thiam’s work, we will encounter figures, but if they are featured, they will be masked or moving, blurred or invisible. In rendering the flickery and metamorphic presence of these spirits, Thiam invites his viewers to look and see—sense—beyond the ocular.[xx] He invites us, like Birago Diop had before him in his poem, to listen to things, more often than beings.