These words from dancer and choreographer Smail Kanouté, at The Matter Art Project in Dakar, lead us to think that it is perhaps the future that Senegalese artists want to revisit, and it is this desire that they are trying - sometimes with difficulty - to make the thousands of European visitors present at the Biennale integrate. This brings us back to the idea that art does not change history, but that it allows us to change history. And here, the features that draw this story are already filled with emotion.
The old courthouse and the IN
The "IN" of the biennial is this year entitled "Ndaffa (the forge, in Wolof)", inviting to the "construction of new models". The old courthouse, with its power, light and architecture, is the perfect place to find what you are looking for. Among the 59 artists from 28 countries, including 16 African countries and 12 countries of the diaspora, a selection is necessary, and some meet our - subjective - expectations.
The two rooms dedicated to Abdoulaye Konaté's "textile sculptures" are a consensus. Among the works in front of which visitors stop, the textiles and embroideries of Ana Silva, as well as the large format of the young Kenyan artist Kaloki Nyamai installed at the entrance. The artist, invited to the Kenyan pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, and whose work has just joined the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, was under the care of his American gallery owner Bart Keijsers Koning. We also enjoy the series The Rest Paintings (and the presence) of Mo Laudi (Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape), South African artist and curator, who is in charge of the Globalisto exhibition at the Mamac in Saint-Etienne (25 June to 16 October 2022).
Abdoulaye Konaté, Lune bleue 2 PM (2019)
Ana Silva
Mo Laudi (Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape), Rest-itution
Further on, the forest by the South African artist Emmanuel Tussore brings together imposing stumps standing on steel piles, questioning the notions of uprooting, identity and the relationship with the "other". Upstairs, Roméo Mivekannin - represented in Dakar by Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - attracts attention with his large black acrylic paintings on free canvases. The painter Omar Ba, who has been endorsed by collectors, presents three works on the first floor of the building, but his most interesting recent works are probably about fifty kilometers away, in his studio near the Lac Rose.
Marked by the pandemic, Fally Sene Sow offers an immersive installation taking us in the darkness of his neighborhood of Colobane. He presents a chaotic version of it, using objects found in his environment.
Off
Among the hundreds of events to choose from within the "OFF" of the Biennial, the most awaited was the exhibition proposed by Black Rock - a residence founded by the American painter of Nigerian origin Kehinde Wiley. On this occasion, the Douta Seck House of Culture, which had been abandoned for a long time, has risen from its ashes. It is here that the works of resident artists (already well established in the market and represented by leading galleries) are exhibited. Among them are Zohra Opoku, and Chelsea Odufu, whose visibility was boosted by an impressive opening night featuring a live performance by Nigerian-American singer Teniola Apata (Teni the Entertainer).
Zohra Opoku, Book of the Dead/ The Papyrus of Sobekmose Series: The Myths of Eternal Life, Chapter IV, (2021) — Black Rock Senegal
The great Soly Cissé
At the National Gallery, the paintings by Soly Cissé (b. 1969) stand out. The artist, with his hybrid, unclassifiable style, king of the play with matter, is interested in identity and power relationships. Soly Cissé puts "animal, human and individual identities in tension", observes curator Massamba Mbaye, "he transposes our defects, our affects, our hidden evolutions into the animal or hybrid kingdom, in order to send us back to ourselves in a different way. His work definitely deserves to be reconsidered.
Soly Cissé
A few steps away, the Hoop Gallery presents the work of Sambou Diouf, an artist whose meeting with ... Soly Cissé was decisive. A must-see.
Sambou Diouf
Another recommended detour is to the residence of the European Union Embassy in Senegal, where the great Nigerian curator and director of the African Artists' Foundation (AAF), Azu Nwagbogu, highlights digital art and the use of new technologies in a conversation between Africa and its diaspora. Through the works of Younes Baba Ali, Moufouli Bello and Charl Landvreugd, the exhibition addresses "the question of time against the backdrop of restitution, memory and Afro-futurism."
On the Corniche Ouest, in one of the two spaces of the Galerie Atiss, the paintings of the Congolese painter Ngimbi Bakambana Luve and the collages of Ousmane Bâ can be discovered.
At Raw Material is a brilliant research and creation structure: "Le Spectre des Ancêtres en Devenir" proposes a photographic and video exhibition, accompanied by exchanges and testimonies, surrounding the history of the Vietnamese-Senegalese community, the result of four years of work by the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The aim here is to give a voice to a community built under the French colonial enterprise, the journey of which has been marked by violence, resistance and resilience. These moving testimonies ask: "What might the memory of what has never been seen look like?
Raw Material - "Le Spectre des Ancêtres en Devenir"
In an event such as the biennial - and in particular its opening week - the challenge for the visual arts is to manage to provide as many smiles and emotions as the live artists, concerts, which punctuate the evenings. As in 2018, it is notably The Matter that succeeds in this exercise. This is where the richness and diversity of contemporary cultural creation is expressed. In the space of the Association Sportive de l'Aéronautique Civile, works, moments and rooms follow one another, notably having side by side the works of Mama Diarra Niang, Aliou Badou Diack, Cécile Ndiaye, Antoine Tempé or the brilliant Smail Kanouté in "The project titled (Un)Charted Grounds" led by Thomas Cazenave and Bénédicte Samson; as the latter defines it, it is an "introspective and delicate ballad in these elsewheres which also speak of us, a suggestion to (re)connection, a sensory moment of freedom and appeasement."
Cécile Ndiaye - Antoine Tempé
The 14th Dakar Biennale is on view through June 21, 2022.
Cover image: Smail Kanouté - Matter Art Project
