Intriguing pyramids… and a huge yellow dog have burst onto the Dakar corniche: for the long-awaited Biennial of Contemporary African Art opening Thursday, artists are taking over public space to “bring down the walls” museums and galleries, an innovation of this 14th edition.
Facing the magnetic blue of the ocean, inhabitants silently approach the two pyramid-shaped mausoleums. Inside and outside, dozens of faces in the ground, eyes closed forever, some screaming. Shoes escape from the mausoleums, lined up to the edge of the cliff, as if falling into the sea.
A powerful evocation and denunciation, by the Senegalese artist Yakhya Ba, of the tragedies of illegal migration that mourn so many African families.
A little further on, an imperturbable oversized dog is the subject of selfies from amused residents, the goal of Egyptian Khaled Zaki who wanted to bring joy to children and raise the problem of stray dogs in the capital.
Bringing “down the walls of galleries and museums”, moving “the artist’s studio to the street” and breaking “the elitist imagination that the city dweller has of art”: this “Doxantu” project (the promenade, in the Wolof language) is a real “plea for an art that is more present in the public space”, plead the organizers.
Hundreds of exhibits
The bubbling capital is renowned for its creative energy, in a country that has seen the birth of great artists such as Ousmane Sow.
After a postponement in 2020 because of the Covid, the 14th edition welcomes until June 21 the best of contemporary creation from the continent. The 2018 edition attracted nearly 250,000 visitors, including more than 50,000 from abroad.
“85 countries are represented and more than 2,500 artists present in the IN and the OFF throughout the territory and the diaspora”, according to the organizers.
The artistic director, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, has the frankness to observe that, in this poor country, “society, beyond the cultural actors, has not always felt the Biennale”, despite the hundreds of exhibitions and places open to all and media coverage.
He asked 17 artists to produce monumental works in situ to “dialogue” with the places along the corniche (fishing village, university, prison, etc.), and scheduled performances “in remote places” in the capital.
The theme of this edition is “Ndaffa (the forge, in Wolof)”, “the construction of new models”.
Nearly 300 exhibitions in Dakar and on the islands of Ngor and Gorée, and around a hundred in other cities and countries of the diaspora, are on the IN program and around 350 projects in the OFF.
“This Biennale is symbolically strong because it is after the Covid-19 crisis which shook and tested African countries”, underlines Mr. Ndiaye in an interview with AFP.
“Africa is at the crossroads of several changes: movements for a new appropriation of African heritage, questions about the CFA franc, about the autonomy of African countries, unrest in several countries, emergence of new citizen consciousness…”
During this Biennale, “we invite artists to have their own points of view on all this, to forge new ways of thinking, to do everything not to withdraw into themselves and not to drift”, he said.
“Making Culture Crackle”
The international exhibition presents, in a former courthouse with a timeless atmosphere, 59 visual artists from the official selection, from 28 countries, including 16 African countries and 12 countries of the diaspora.
Among them, we will be able to be challenged by the dreamlike visions of the sensation of contemporary African art, the Senegalese painter Omar Ba, by a video by the South African Sethembile Msezane or an installation transporting in space the Franco-Togolo -Senegalese, Caroline Gueye, also an astrophysicist.
Among other key exhibitions, a “forest” of 343 sculptures – men, women, children, without arms, as if overwhelmed – by the Senegalese Ousmane Dia, who denounces inequalities, inviting a new order “that dwells more on the human dignity”.
A scientific symposium, organized by the writer Felwine Sarr, will discuss the restitution of African heritage.
“This is also the time when on the other side of the world there is a war,” Ndiaye said of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “When the weapons crackle, we must make the culture crackle and bet even more on it,” he urges. (AFP)