While vibrant and cosmopolitan, the city of Bamako, situated on the Niger River, doesn’t have much of an art scene. But that hasn’t stopped it from emerging as one of the most important stops on the global biennial circuit for exploring contemporary photography.

The eighth edition of the event, newly retitled “Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial,” takes on the theme of “Borders” as its focal point. Borders in every sense imaginable, that is.

Acknowledging the discursive dimensions — or possibilities — of the concept, creative directors Michket Krifat and Laura Serani cast a wide net in organizing the biennial; the results, dispersed throughout various venues in Mali’s capital, explore how borders — social, political, economic — remain quite visible in Africa despite efforts to restructure and reconceptualize them.

The Musée National du Mali functions as the nucleus of this year’s biennial, taking place Nov. 7 to Dec. 7, with several exhibitions, roundtables, portfolio reviews, and presentations, not to mention the usual lunch meetings and soirées, taking place within the museum’s Mayan-inspired, Jean-Loup Pivindesigned buildings.

The biennial is anchored by the main pan-African exhibition, which offers a broad “panoramic” perspective on how African artists are engaging with the concept of borders. Featuring photography and video from more than 50 artists, the show reflects an overwhelming fixation with the documentary genre that, after a while, grows unsettling, not just for its content, but for a narrow curatorial perspective that seems to betray the expansiveness of the theme. Aside from leaving the impression that contemporary African photography is overtly literal, journalistic, and observation-based, the exhibition also leaves one wishing the curators had done more to elaborate on the exhibition’s thesis — perhaps by exploring the depths of the medium itself.

Some individual works, however, show real critical and conceptual engagement. South African artist Alastair Whitton, in his 2009 series “Patmos and the War at Sea,” challenges the viewer to engage with his nebulous depictions of war. Each photograph, paired with a sheet of Braille, invites the viewer to interpret — to “read” and to “feel” — the experiences before them. Interpretive impulses can also be located in Berry Bickles seductive video piece On the Wire (2009), which allows viewers to voyeuristically watch a shameless young man, clad in a white wedding dress, explore himself before a mirror. The sense of freedom and ambiguity conveyed by his gestures accord with the artist’s intention to, as she explained, leave the work “free” and “open.”

One artist exploring how photography can be presented is Abraham Oghobase, who presents images from his “Lost In Transit” series as a video slide presentation, to a soundtrack of the eerily minimal sounds of Ravins Buddha Bar IX. The slide format and music imbue the images, which chronicle the artist’s experiences living in Berlin, with an enthralling nostalgia that positions the work as an intimate reflection of experiences past.

The main exhibition culminates and climaxes with Burkinan-born Saïdou Dickos charmingly sublime World Mosaic (2005–09), an elongated grid of some 600 images each measuring about 3 x 4 inches, and together forming mini visual narratives constructed over the course of four years. The photographs, with their emphasis on shadows, delineate a space that eschews geographic markers, and are unfettered by the politics of borders. Given this, it is apt that the artist refers to his diaristic mosaic as “an imaginary world of pictures that shows us what we want to see.”

As one might expect, some of the strongest work in the biennial is found in its smaller, ancillary exhibitions. Located across from the main exhibition in the Musée du National’s Textile Hall is a series of recent photographs by distinguished Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, the signature black-and-white images seamlessly integrated with the museum’s permanent textile collection. At the Musée du District de Bamako, Fazal Sheikhs “A Sense of Common Ground” offers an intense account of the artist’s intimate interactions with displaced African refugees. At the Centre Cultural Français de Bamako, Alain Turpaults “Albinos” exhibition features simple, yet evocatively poetic portraits of African albino children before stark black backgrounds, effortlessly using the aesthetics of black-and-white photography to address the infanticide of albino children in parts of Africa.

As diffuse as the biennial’s theme could be, one event, the Invisible Borders project, did manage to express it cogently. In an hour-long slide presentation and film screening, the project documented the experiences of 10 Lagos-based artists and photographers who traveled together, over the course of six days, from Lagos to Bamako by road — crossing borders in Benin, Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast. The presentation was an amalgamation of photographs and audio taken during the journey, and while the images themselves did not differ much from most of the documentary work featured throughout the biennial, the presentation and subsequent discussions insightfully expressed the overall theme in quite an unparalleled manner. The artists discussed frankly their challenges in crossing borders, particularly in Francophone countries where the participants felt that the language barriers signaled a hostility between Anglophone and Francophone West African countries. These comments spurred a great deal of debate about nationalism and the lack of unity among African countries, prompting one to wonder what else, besides physical borders, stands in the way of a united Africa.

Antawan I. Byrd is a 2009–10 US Fulbright Fellow and Curatorial Assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos.