<p>The 14th Dak’Art Biennale reflects decades of collective art-making</p>

Dulcie Abrahams Altass

No stopping in Senegal

<p>One of the most evocative images of the late Senegalese artist <strong>Issa Samb</strong>’s eclectic and expansive practice shows a red no-entry sign. Over the thick white line that indicates ‘stop,’ Samb had written ‘marche!!!’ (or, walk, in French). Faced with a dead end, the famous artist simply refused, and instead encouraged action and movement. Samb’s commanding word and the sentiment behind it embodies art-making in Dakar, a city known widely as the art capital of West Africa.</p><p>‘Dakar is made up of strong individuals who have also been able to come together to create collectives that have left a strong mark on the city,’ explains the French-Senegalese filmmaker <strong>Gaëlle Leroy</strong>. An extended family of people anchored in the realities of their context may well be the defining feature of Dakar’s creative ecosystem. Artists here use their practices to instigate change in the world, and their unity to persevere – despite a dearth of local funding or a suitable arts infrastructure, and against a backdrop of increasing calls for social and religious conservatism in Senegal. At the 14th edition of the Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art, which runs from May 19 to June 21, art workers’ roles in collaborative processes of ‘civil governance’, as Leroy puts it,&nbsp;are keenly felt, as they have been since the biennial began spotlighting African visual art in 1996.</p>

<p>This community spirit is the foundation of both art and life in Dakar. The biennial’s main, official exhibition, or IN program, includes artists who are active both locally and internationally, such as <strong>Omar Ba</strong> (whose mixed-media paintings often depict narratives connecting European and African histories), and <strong>Adji Dieye</strong>, who received the Talent Award from the photography and visual media exhibition space C/O Berlin in 2021. But more integrated within the city’s fabric is the open OFF program, which features nearly 400 exhibitions woven through its vibrant streets.</p>

<p>Many trace the lineage of collective practice in Dakar to the <strong>Laboratoire Agit’Art</strong>, a multidisciplinary group of artists, filmmakers, and writers founded in the mid-1970s. Through street performances, installations, happenings, and workshops, it connected to and ‘agitated’ society, spurred on artistic production, and&nbsp;challenged the colonialism-disavowing philosophy of négritude that was prevalent at the time, spearheaded by Léopold Sédar Senghor, then president of Senegal, by focusing on local community. Samb was a co-founder of the Laboratoire, along with <strong>El Hadji Sy</strong>, whose paintings and objects explore political issues like migration and memory and who develops works that necessitate audience participation. Currently running at Selebe Yoon, an art venue founded in 2020, Sy’s exhibition ‘Now/Naaw’ deploys large-scale works on wheels, ensembles of paintings that function like puzzles, and a monumental mobile installation.</p>

<p>Carrying on the Laboratoire’s ethos of social investment is The School of Mutants, an ongoing research and exhibition project that the artists <strong>Hamedine Kane</strong> and <strong>Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro</strong> initiated in 2018. They delve into the latent potential found in West Africa’s many abandoned educational infrastructures, like the monolithic, unfinished University of African Futures in Sengal, and the pan-African Afrihili language created by the Ghanaian engineer Kumi Attobrah in the 1970s. ‘What happens in the streets, markets, Koranic teaching schools, public squares, territories on the margins – all these realities come from types of organization that produce forms, knowledge, and aesthetics,’ Kane says. ‘The role of artists and collectives is to index or understand this sensibility and make it accessible.’ Working with Dak’Art’s guest curator Syham Weigant, The School of Mutants is showing its latest iteration during the biennial – an installation featuring a Fulani-style cabin and photographs of the architecture of exile – at IFAN, one of West Africa’s oldest museums.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, Raw Material Company – simultaneously a residency program, a platform for debate and dialogue, and an exhibition space – has also committed to strengthening the relationship between art and society, one of the aims of Koyo Kouoh, Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, when she launched Raw in 2008, opening its physical space in 2011. As part of the OFF program, Raw presents <em>The Specter of Ancestors Becoming</em> (2019), a video installation by the artist <strong>Tuan Andrew Nguyen</strong> that explores the history of the local Senegalese-Vietnamese community, accompanied by archival family photos.</p>

<p>Thanks to OFF’s hundreds of exhibitions, art appears on every corner of Dakar –outdoors, in hotel lobbies, in bars and restaurants – appropriated on a massive scale by the general public. Dak’Art’s assistant curator Anna Karima Wane explains that this broad resonance is one of Dakar’s greatest strengths, and local artists are often known to audiences far beyond exhibition-goers for their grassroots practice and activism. Like <strong>Mamadou Boye Diallo</strong> – aka <strong>Modboye </strong>– a rollerblading curator and artist from the city’s buzzing Médina district who established the Yataal Art organization in 2010 to ‘make art accessible to all, working with and for the Dakar community.’ With his vast network of local and international collaborators, Modboye has transformed swathes of his hometown into what he calls the Open Air Museum, an agglomeration of murals along residential streets that have become part of the landscape of daily life.</p>

<p>The museum’s outdoor exhibition ‘Checkpoint’ includes a restored pirogue that is a meeting point for discussing the dangers of migration by sea – over the past two decades many Senegalese have attempted to travel to Europe or further afield via fishing boat. The lives and economies of this peninsula city have always been inextricably tied to the Atlantic, and this year’s IN program includes 17 large installations along Dakar’s coastal promenade, by artists such as <strong>Serigne Mbaye Camara</strong> and <strong>Jems Koko Bi</strong>, as part of the Doxantu project (the word means ‘stroll’ in Wolof, Dakar’s primary language). Such initiatives bring art to large audiences and allow new dialogues to emerge.</p>

<p>Even the city’s dozen or so commercial galleries share a sense of inclusion. Up the central staircase of the imposing peach-hued Maginot building, a landmark in Dakar, one finds&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/33153/OH-Gallery">OH Gallery</a>, owned by the young curator Océane Harati. Representing mostly West African artists, among them <strong>Ibrahima Thiam</strong> and <strong>Félicité Codjo</strong>, Harati has made a mission of promoting the experience of visiting galleries for locals. Since opening her own in 2018, she has noticed increased interest in how art spaces, and the artworld in general, function. ‘People ask for information,’ she says. ‘How do they behave in a gallery? How do we buy? How do we do research?’</p>

<p>Venues like hers are active players in another communal effort that has become a recurring and important event since 2011: Partcours (coordinated by the aforementioned Leroy) brings together 30-odd art spaces in Dakar and its suburbs for a season of openings and happenings towards the end of each year. Like so much else, the event fosters solidarity. Harati has also been developing partnerships with organizations beyond the artworld, such as the Senegalese environmental NGO Océanium. ‘We’re trying to show what we’ve done within the social fabric here in Dakar, so there are programs at the gallery, beyond our walls, and in other institutions,’ she explains.</p>

<p>During the biennial, OH Gallery is screening <strong>Lamine Diack</strong>’s short film <em>The Underwater Museum</em> at Océanium, which documents an eponymous intervention undertaken by the artists <strong>Mischa Sanders</strong> and <strong>Philipp Putzer</strong> in 2021. In it, the artists plunge sculptures into the ocean off Dakar’s coast to evolve alongside and support aquatic life forms. This subtle gesture of repair and interspecies collaboration takes up the mantle of Samb’s invocation, which continues to echo through the city’s art spaces, streets, and beaches. Don’t stop&hellip;just keep walking.</p>

<p>
	Dulcie Abrahams Altass is a Dakar-based writer and curator.

</p><p>
	El Hadji Sy is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1525/Galerie-Barbara-Thumm">Galerie Barbara Thumm</a>, Berlin, and will have a solo presentation at Art Basel in Basel’s Feature sector in June. <strong>OH Gallery</strong> will present work by Aliou Diack in Art Basel in Basel’s Statements sector. Omar Ba is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1451/Templon">Templon</a>, Paris.
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