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Dak'Art, the Dakar Biennale, is a contemporary art biennial hosted in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Established in 1989, it has hosted the widest variety of African contemporary artists of any continental exhibition. The biennial is a major link between the African and international art worlds and among Senegal's most significant cultural productions.

Program


Dak'Art is a visual art biennial held every two years in Dakar at the IFAN Museum of African Arts, near the state legislature and part of the University of Dakar. The museum is split between exhibition space for traditional African art and the biennial's International Exhibition. Its opening ceremony is held at a nearby theater, where the president and organizers give speak and present awards before proceeding to the main exhibition hall. Other lectures and performances coincide with the festival.

Artists for Dak'Art's main exhibition, the International Exhibition, are invited to apply the year prior to the show. Dak'Art defines diaspora artists as those who "recognize and accept their African origin". A selection committee and jury of curators then decide the composition. The international curators, whose number have varied between years, have increased in influence over the selection over time. Recent biennials have also carried specific themes. Selected artists are selected, for example, for reasons of originality, quality of aesthetics or concept, and topicality of discourse, regardless of the festival's theme. The festival's President Senghor Prize is its most prestigious. Artists without African origins can participate in "Off-exhibitions" outside the main exhibition. These shows expanded from private exhibitions: 29 shows in 1998 grew to 150 in 2010, and are cursorily documented in Off-catalogues.

The festival is funded by the Senegal Ministry of Culture, major Senegalese companies, la Francophonie, West African Economic and Monetary Union, and the American, French, and Spanish embassies in Dakar. The European Union contributed as well in recent years. The Ministry of Culture has particular influence over the biennial and appoints the event's General Secretary, who leads the biennial's Organization Committee. An additional Orientation Committee supports the main committee by selecting the theme, general curator, and jury.

History
After Senegal became politically independent in 1960, its first president, Léopold Senghor, prioritized arts and culture promotion as a means for creating a national identity. In 1966, Senegal's capital of Dakar hosted the World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN), which promoted pan-African artistry and identity as an extension of the Negritude movement, for which the president had been known. The 1966 festival introduced African art forms and a pan-African renaissance to the international stage, and modeled a successful festival for what would become the Dak'Art art biennial. Though Dak'Art differed in mission and scope with greater focus on visual art, the two festivals shared an origin as Africa-native events, rather than descendants of the cosmopolitan Venice Biennale.



In 1976, the Dakar-based African Cultural Institute proposed a fine art biennial in the vein of the Venice Biennale in which the organization's member states would rotate as hosts. The Institute hoped to enhance their program, foster a pan-African interchange between artists and their artwork, encourage investment in new modern art museums, and increase international art market interest in contemporary African art. The plan was reported in a 1977 journal article but was not actualized.

A literature-focused biennial, held in 1990, preceded Dak'Art's modern incarnation as an art-focused biennial. This Biennale of Arts and Letters was designed promote the works of Senegal's artists and intellectuals, and was planned to alternate between literature- and visual art-focused festivals every two years. However, after the 1992 visual art-focused biennial, whence Dak'Art assumed its contemporary identity, the festival would remain solely a visual art festival. The festival skipped 1994 due to financial issues in Senegal, but reconvened and rebranded in 1996 as the "Biennale of Contemporary African Art", marking its difference in focus from other art biennials: featuring only artists from Africa and its diaspora. The new focus intended to give African artists better visibility within the continent, as some were better known in the United States and Europe. The 1996 Dak'Art featured 117 artists from 34 countries, and has since recurred as a biennial every two years.

2008
The 2008 festival's theme, "Africa: Mirror?", refers to self-questioning—as if before a mirror—of the status and prejudices of contemporary Africa. It, in part, responded to a speech at the University of Dakar by French president Nicholas Sarkozy, whose overtones of colonialism and outmoded prejudices were renounced by African intellectuals. Several works at Dak'Art commented on relations between Europe and Africa, with references to the imperial Berlin Conference and European Union flag. In Third Text, art historian Margareta Wallin Wictorin interpreted those works as criticism of the Amsterdam Treaty in the late 1990s and its elimination of border controls between countries in the European Union, which created additional border scrutiny where Europe meets Africa. Artists from 13 African nations and the diaspora contributed 48 works to the International Exhibition. The premiere President Senghor Prize was split between two artists who separately presented an interactive punching bag piece and a hedge of trees shaped into human bodies, respectively reflective of internecine violence within South Africa and the conflict between humans and nature, such as the expansion of the Sahara. Outside the main exhibition, 140 Off-exhibition shows went on display in Dakar and around Senegal.

2010
For Dak'Art's 20th anniversary, its "Retrospectives and Perspectives" theme referred to a retrospective of the biennial's history and the perspectives of young artists with new views of contemporary African arts. The retrospective showed works from the nine previous President Senghor Prize winners. The young artists exhibition included 26 artists from 16 states,, as chosen from the selections of five curators, each of whom reviewed applications and proposed their own candidates from their assigned region of Africa. They also each proposed guest artists for a solo show at Dakar's National Gallery, from whom Berni Searle, Goddy Leye, and Peter Clarke exhibited. In an act of solidarity and pan-African unity with Haiti, which experienced a major earthquake the prior year, four Haitian artists exhibited at Dak'Art. Other artists presented in 150 Off-exhibition shows in Dakar and around Senegal, ten more than at the previous festival.

Multiple works highlighted the ways in which borders limit contemporary African opportunity, and the plight of the African immigrant in other states. In lieu of the traditional inauguration, an Ethopian performance artist confused guests by sealing the museum's main entrance with a barbed wire fence, behind which he stood guard in battledress. Upon learning that the unofficial performance was meant to signify Dak'Art as breaking boundaries, the Senegalese Minister of Culture cut the fence to open the exhibition. In a related piece, the artist pierced paint tubes with barbed wire to spill like blood against a white canvas in representation of the man-made laws that cause human suffering and restrain Africans from traveling the world. Another artist presented his travel documents instead of his selected work to show the legal restrictions that prevented his attendance. The President Senghor Prize winner's installation proposed a Union of States to replace the state unions such as the European Union, replete with an anthem that mixed that of the European Union and African states, a proposed flag, currency, and other symbols. He compared the systemic desire to emigrate out of Africa to the transatlantic slave trade: "Today you don't put the slave in the boat—you travel on your own", and argued that Africans would not venture to ensnare themselves in emigration if they had the means to live within Africa. The withdrawal of the European Union's funding for the 2010 festival significantly impacted its scope, and through their selections, the biennial's jury promoted works critical of the European Union and supportive of alternative arrangements and pan-African unity.

2012


Amidst the Arab Spring, in which public demonstrations in North African and Arab states led to social revolutions, Dak'Art 2012 explored the connection between artists and the milieu, such as their role in mass mobilizations and how politics develop out of crisis. The biennial's theme was "Contemporary Creation and Social Dynamics". The International Exhibition's three curators chose 42 artists, mostly from applications, to represent the biennial's values and the content's ambitions and circumstances. Outside artists presented in 140 Off-exhibition shows—a return to the 2008 level.

Works largely focused on African politics, as opposed to the European focus of prior biennials. One large Off-exhibition's photographs chronicled Dakar's own riots against its president, and as was a theme in the Wade riots, artists in the main exhibition addressed dynastic transfer of power. Other works reflected Africa's issues, such as the women's rights and political opportunities, inadequacies of public infrastructure, memories of colonial power in public names, and individual and group identities within a crowd. Another selected piece by Moroccan Mounir Fatmi displayed commercialized versions of American black nationalist group Black Panther symbols, commenting on accommodations the once radical party and pan-Africanism had made since the 1960s. The biennial's General Secretary reaffirmed the role of artists and intellectuals in fulfilling the responsibilities created by crises.

2014
The 2014 edition was hosted by three curators including Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi.

Reception
Art critics Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu considered remarkable the biennial's longevity and ascendance into a prominent international event as "arguably the most important international platform for established and emerging African artists". Its origins and focus on Africa-related artists was also unique, noted artist Sue Williamson, in that the biennial was created by decree of Senegal's "poet president" rather than by art world forces, and that the young state of Senegal also, uniquely, saw culture promotion as a means for economic development. In a 2014 history of Dak'Art, Cédric Vincent disagreed with the choice of the biennial in culture promotion and posited that a contemporary art center in Dakar would have fared better in expanding the country's artistic palate and training curators. Art historian Margareta Wallin Wictorin noted that works from Dak'Art often proposed pan-African unity as a form of internationalism and a solution to political restraints from Europe.

The Ministry of Culture's role in artist selection was unpopular among critics.

Note to self

 * http://www.sil.si.edu/SILPublications/ModernAfricanArt/maadetail.cfm?subCategory=1990s
 * http://www.sil.si.edu/SILPublications/ModernAfricanArt/maadetail.cfm?subCategory=2000s
 * http://www.sil.si.edu/SILPublications/ModernAfricanArt/maadetail.cfm?subCategory=2010s
 * Check against https://siris-libraries.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile= by subject: Dak'Art