Dreams of Dakar

I WAS NOT EXPECTING the fire dancer. I was not expecting the herd of goats looming out of the darkness near the Léopold Sédar Senghor stadium as my Yango taxi searched for the Village des Arts nestled in the Yoff district. All this, my first adventure within hours of landing in Dakar.

Everyone had told me to be open to destiny, to the unexpected joys and vicissitudes of moving through the contemporary art cradle of West Africa. But you cannot wrap your arms around the oldest, largest contemporary art gathering on the continent without a sense of wonder and awe.

The fifteenth edition of Dak’Art, scheduled for May 2024 and titled “The Wake: Awakening, Xàll wi,” had been pushed back, postponed six months due to political instability. And I was here within a day of its opening to tap the pulse of the hectic, unbridled city lapped by ocean waves. To tap into what many call its “magic.”

Still, I was not expecting a welcome with djembe drumming and fresh bissap, ginger, and ditakh juices, a gallery floored with sand. If the Village des Arts group show opening and studio visits were a blur, I learned of the efforts of the French nonprofit group DIOKO and met the first of many personages, Moussa Sakho, who would invite me to a hopscotch of events. Soon I would learn that it’s by word of mouth that all unfolds—outside the reach of institutions.

The city spread before me, with its diesel fumes and street vendors. And over the next few days, I inched my way closer to the Plateau, through Ouakam and Medina, eternally shifting lodgings.

Dakar’s former courthouse is the headquarters for the Biennale, under the artistic direction of curator and art critic Salimata Diop. Its walls hold works by artists from the African continent and diaspora. Built in 1957, abandoned in 1992, and then reclaimed for the biennial—which is primarily supported by Senegal’s Ministry of Culture—the Brutalist structure is a half ruin with nostalgic overtones.

Haitian American artist Gina Athena Ulysse’s cascading installation For Those Among Us Who Inherited Sacrifice, Rasanblaj! (2024) welcomes visitors with a vision of potent ruins or artifacts—a curtain of cowrie shells spilling into a pile of rubble—a sensitive amalgamation, rocky and fertile terrain—that underscores the kinship among formerly colonized nations.

Sonia E. Barrett’s Map-lective (2024), a collective project whose culmination is a web of braided and dreadlocked map shreds strung across the interior atrium—reimagines mapping, collective narratives, and colonial heritage, and won her this year’s prize for best sculpture with her ephemeral comment on the transatlantic slave trade.

Immersiveness reigned. Shivay La Multiple turned one upstairs room into a wallpapered universe filled with objects of seeming talismanic import. Mohamed Diop orchestrated an Afrofuturistic bar that plunged visitors into a post-nuclear world replete with digital paintings like open portals; it assumed the perspective of the future of an uncolonized, enslavement-free past. One room over, Hiba Baddou’s photographs and film Parables, The Sacralization of Images presented a futuristic, enigmatic, ritualistic landscape in which humans wore satellite dishes atop traditional garb.

With an extraordinary fringed wall hanging, Thonton Kabeya evoked the detritus of contemporary urban life, its monumental accretion a mirror for the layerings of identity, of gentrifying streets.

I was utterly floored by Agnès Brézéphin’s Au Fil de Soi(e), Cabinet of Curiosities, Chamber of Wonders. Visitors enter a darkened room in which a (seemingly) slumbering form on a cot, its wire ribcage filled with spools of thread and silk cocoons, inhabits a tableau of insects, sequins, and the artist’s customary embroidery—a dreamscape laced with nightmare. The piece, which deals with incest, won the Léopold Sédar Senghor grand prize award.

A few rooms away, the video and altar of rotting fruit by Tuli Mekondjo, a self-taught artist with roots in Namibia and Angola, commented on religion and belief and her Namibian ancestors’ conversion to Christianity. This is all rich and dizzying.

So much so that I take the next half day to catch a ferry to the island of Gorée, an idyllic rock off the coast with a population of approximately sixteen hundred, streets of sand, and a painful history inexorably linked to the slave trade.

The “OFF” program that exists in symbiosis with the Biennale and this year animated thirty-three locations in partnership with Partcours extends here, too. Along Gorée’s waterfront, photographic representations of masks are installed in the Freedom and Human Dignity Square (so named in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd). In a central square, in view of the ruined Governor’s Palace, the site-specific installation and photo-performance of Keren Lasme and Wendie Zahibo, proponents of an Afro-diasporic mysticism, blow in the breeze as women sit in the shade of a baobab tree. Far from the noise and pollution, this sleepy island is where Dakarois come on a Sunday to escape the city center. It has its own community of artists and makes for a natural host for these troubling transatlantic narratives.

One evening, a willing crowd removed its shoes to enter RAW Material Company in Zone B of the city, an institution with a strong, independent presence that includes an artist residency and resource library. Under the direction of founder Koyo Kouoh and with curatorial programming by Delphine Buysse, the scrappy entity has operated since 2008 with the goal of promoting artistic and curatorial research, and hosts a yearly academy of studio visits, discussions, and collaborations.

The crowd was there to watch in rapt silence as actress Nathalie Vairac performed a piece in conjunction with her solo exhibition “MUṬIKKAPPAṬĀTA.” Floor pillows dotted the back courtyard, a projection bathed her body in washes of color and archival footage, and Vairac wove a tapestry of intimate threads: the DNA strand of religion, identity, and her belonging in Guadeloupe, Pondicherry, and Dakar. The crowd’s emotion at the end was palpable in long embraces.

A similar energy coursed through Antoine Tempé’s Le Loft Dakar the following night. Photographer and former dancer Tempé had orchestrated an artistic rendezvous between Franco-Malian multidisciplinary artist Smaïl Kanouté and Dakar-based hip-hop artist and producer (and recent music label founder) Ibaaku, who performed in the street of the Medina neighborhood where Le Loft shares a building with Atiss Gallery. Wearing a costume given to him by the Yellow Pocahontas Black Indian Tribe of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras community, Kanouté shook; a demon in a silver mask emerged from the crowd; a couch full of children fled at the sight of this unannounced apparition. On the rooftop, after a brief pause, the duo performed again, blending sound and dance, ritual and improvisation. They seemed to fall into a trance, at once wildly rhythmic and meandering, hallucinatory, riveting, and mesmerizing.

And in the studio afterward, as he doffed his garb of cloth, beads, and feathers, Kanouté spoke of Creole identity and the dance, language, and costumes that unite Black Indians and Beninese within matrices of resilience and imagination. Here, too, I felt an energy at once electric and urgent and imbued with the richness of something shared.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was not this. Not this crossroads that somehow feels natural and essential. Nor this collective awakening.

The Senegalese gallery scene is strong and growing. At Selebe Yoon, not far from the first major international gallery, Cécile Fakhoury (opened in Dakar in 2018), and nearby OH Gallery (also founded in 2018), a tripartite offering included the glowing light boxes of Ibrahim Cissé in his first solo show. His collage on vinyl poignantly reinterpreted family albums following his brother’s death. The alchemical works of Arébénor Basséne harness gum arabic, pigment, sand, and other materials to form imaginary worlds that are mysterious and a bit utopian. A wonderful installation complemented his paintings featured in the Biennale. His is one of many examples of ordinary materials turned incendiary.

Many of the artists I encounter have gallery representation abroad. Passing the Presidential Palace in the dark, I hurry to the Théodore Monod African Art Museum, where, in the swirl of an opening to which I am late, I catch Franco-Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo, who lives in Paris, being interviewed wearing Converse and chunky jewelry. Represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., he stands in front of one of the prints he’s contributed to the fundraising exhibition with the Malian textile artist Abdoulaye Konaté. There, too, are Zulu Mbaye, president of the Village des Arts, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, who splits his time between Dakar, Berlin, and Morocco (and whose work was in the collection of former president Senghor). “These are the greats,” a new acquaintance tells me—a young Senegalese artist who lives in Paris but returns to rent a work studio on the island of Ngor, to paint and reconnect with these giants.

On my last full day in the city, I return to the former Palais de Justice for the guest curators’ exhibition “We Will Stop When the Earth Roars” on ecological crisis and resistance. I am there to see the beads and motorcycle of Beya Gille Gacha. There to admire the cyanotype photographs on cotton and the gossamer, spiderweb tunnel of journalist-artist Laeïla Adjovi, who studies cotton-growing in Benin. The souwere glass painting of the queen of the technique, Anta Germaine Gaye, is the subject of an “Homage” section. Visitors’ eyes are drawn in by her works’ glittering veins of silver and gold.

Laced with magical moments, the Biennale makes up for in energy what it lacks in structure. Losing track of time in the halls, I drift into a new temporality, which I am beginning to apprehend. The sheer density of events overwhelms; still, it’s a gentle sort of unstoppable fervor.

It’s dusk by the time the sound of singing and percussive rattling summons me to a performance on the front steps, an activation of Ulysse’s artwork. Buses turn in the circular drive before the courthouse entrance, ending their routes. Swallows scythe through the evening sky, which is the same color as the water. In this place of unexpected encounters, this city full of construction as though eternally in progress, I am profoundly aware that I am standing on the tip of a continent. After five days in the maelstrom, I feel calm descend. I let it wash over me.