Jean-Jacques MANDEL
is an Africanist anthropologist, journalist, grand reporter and art dealer-gallerist by passion.
In the 1970s, after a study on “The Ergonomics of underwater work in deep diving under gas mixture” conducted on Total’s offshore oil projects in the North Sea and off Gabon and Congo under Aegis of Comex, CNEXO, and the University of Aix-Marseille, he collaborates as a photographer and great reporter for Marie-Claire group while conducting, following a crossing of the Sahara, ethnological studies in Mopti, in the Niger loop (“Clay Toys Of Mopti” in African Arts UCLA, 1977). After a transatlantic sailing from Dakar to Bahia in Brazil, back in Paris, he joined the daily newspaper Liberation in 1981 for ten years, then the agencies Magnum Photos and Contact Press Images as well as various magazines. Deputy editor-in-chief of Géo magazine, he travelled across Africa and several continents in the footsteps of the African diasporas from the slave trade. Specialist in voodoo and ethnopsychiatry, he has been searshing and collecting sacred objects for more than thirty years (Benin, Togo, Haiti), some of which have joined large collections, including that of Marc and Marie-Luce Arbogast at the Château Musée Vaudou in Strasbourg (2007) or have been presented in various exhibitions: Musée du Quai Branly, “The Masters of Disorder” (2012), Cavin-Morris Gallery, New-York (2015), Galerie Le L’œil “Benin from yesterday to today”, Tanlay 2016, Musée de La Corderie Royale de Rochefort, “Corps de cordes” (2017/2018), “Asafo flags of Ghana” Avant-Retard, Paris (2018), “Vincent Gicquel + vétiches voodoo ”Galerie Thomas Bernard / Cortex Athletico, Paris (2018),,“ Blanchard versus Lobi ”Avant-Retard, Paris (2019),“ Protection Rapprochée! »Galerie J-P Ritsch-Fisch, Starsbourg (2019).
In 1995 he participated in the exhibition “Les Vieux Papas” which presents cult photos and portraits of Vodou priests taken by Jacques Kerchache in the early 1970s. On his request, he wrote the catalog text.
In 1997 he co-organized with Jacques Kerchache the exhibition “Patrick Vilaire, Reflection on death” at La Fondation Cartier “in Paris. He collaborates in the catalog (published by Actes Sud) with texts, interviews and photos taken in situ in Port au Prince, in Haiti, in the workshop of Patrick Vilaire and in the workshops and places of worship of Croix des Bouquets, the famous village / community of “voodoo smiths”.
In 2010 he inaugurated the Jean-Jacques Mandel / Arts Premiers Gallery in Bordeaux and participated in the “Mistrust” exhibition organized by the Cortex Athletico Gallery. Since 2015 he opens Ephemeral Showrooms in Paris to compare Art Brut with Art Premier in several exhibitions.
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