Press room — Sanlé Sory, Generation Volta

Generation Volta — Sanlé Sory

From 1 August to 1 October 2026, Sakana Gallery presents Generation Volta, an exhibition devoted to the Burkinabè photographer Sanlé Sory. Opening Saturday 1 August, 7pm to 10pm. Free entry.

In 1960, the year Upper Volta gained independence, a seventeen-year-old opened a photography studio in Bobo-Dioulasso and called it Volta Photo. For more than twenty years, against his painted backdrops, he photographed an entire city with a trunk of props his sitters made their own: sunglasses, transistor radio, telephone, Air Afrique flight bag.

These photographs are not ethnographic documents. They are the collective self-portrait of a generation performing itself at the very moment its country was being invented. That is the meaning of the title.

His work, rediscovered in the 2010s, is now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Generation Volta is the first solo exhibition devoted to Sanlé Sory in the Basque Country.

Images supplied for press coverage of the exhibition only, for its duration. Credit must be given; the image must not be cropped or overprinted.