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The

Artist

Nominated in
2025
By
FOMU
Lives and Works in
Brussels
Anna Safiatou Touré (Bamako, Mali, born in 1996) is a Franco-Malian multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. She graduated from the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Fine Arts and the ENSAV La Cambre in photography. Anna Safiatou was awarded the Médiatine Prize in 2022 and the Roger De Conynck Fund in 2023-24. Her work explores the space that unites or separates the two sides of every migratory narrative. The journey through this personal, historical, and cultural blending fills for her empty or unanswered spaces. On her own scale, she wishes to materialize this absence by creating her own evidence to make history heard—rendering the absence visible to tell stories from these new bodies. Like a certain poetry of emptiness, couldn’t the world be told in reverse, like a stencil, from the edge?
Projects
2025

Gamanké Museum

Gamanké Museum is a multimedia project exploring the place of objects from Sub-Saharan Africa in European societies and their institutions. Supported by the Roger de Conynck Fund, it will reach its final form in April 2025. This project revolves around a collection of “tourist masks”: inexpensive reproductions of traditional masks, primarily sold to a white audience. These objects, though fake, perpetuate a colonial legacy: a commerce that continues to erase historical, cultural, and spiritual narratives. From these masks, I take plaster negative impressions from the backs of the objects, symbolically revealing the face that carries them—or rather, the absence of that face. The photographic component thus presents twelve Gamanké masks, photographed according to the traditional visual codes of sculpture or art photography in Western museums. This treatment, both sensitive and ironic, becomes a means of giving a paradoxical value to these “objects that have died multiple times.” In addition to the photography, a video game offers an immersive fiction around the Gamanké masks. This medium allows me to deconstruct the museum space and imagine an alternative. In the game, visitors interact in an invented language, Dgéba. Inspired by the sounds of Bambara and Sonrhai, this fictional language fills a personal and cultural void while providing a universal experience, avoiding the use of English or French. This project, blending photography, text, and virtual elements, invites us to rethink how we observe, preserve, and interpret these legacies.
Anna Safiatou Touré
was nominated by
FOMU
in
2025
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.

FOMU invites three external jurors to help select the artists. This year’s jury consisted of Laure Cottin Stefanelli (artist and .tiff 2019 participant), Bindi Vora (curator, Autograph in London) and Koi Persyn (curator and artistic director at Jester in Genk).

The jury made the selection based on the Fomu criteria:

1. Contemporary relevance
Everything we do is topical and relevant to modern society. We deliberately choose historical and contemporary subjects and projects that are interesting and relatable to a modern audience. We encourage reflection on societal issues and contribute to the prevailing social discourse.

2. Multivocality
We opt for subjects and projects that offer a multifaceted perspective on photographic imagery and the world. We also actively seek out and hold space for different views and perspectives and encourage the representation and involvement of creators from underrepresented communities and backgrounds.

3. Critical reflection on the medium and its evolution
Photography and reality have a multifaceted relationship. We are interested in the mechanisms of photography and deliberately work with photographers who critically engage with the medium or its history and are aware of artistic-conceptual positions and visual language.

4. Ethical position
Due to its complex relationship with reality, photography inevitably raises ethical questions. We are keenly aware of the context in which images emerge and exist. As a result, we always consider the intention and impact of images. We approach all images with the necessary caution and contextualise them within their historical context.

Fomu invited fellow Futures members to be part of the jury that would pick four artists from ten to join the Futures program. The jury consisted of Angel Luis Gonzales & Julia Gelezova of Photo Ireland and Daria Tuminas & Yusser al Obaidi of Fotodok.