Dakar’s Response to the Postponement of Africa’s Largest Biennial Was Vivacious

This past April, just weeks before the opening of Dak’Art, Africa’s largest and longest-running biennial, the Senegalese Minister of Culture abruptly postponed the event citing unrest stemming from the recent political turmoil surrounding the former president’s proposal to postpone national elections.

Senegal’s democratic exceptionalism within a continent rife with military coups was at stake. Protesters set tires ablaze. Tear gas was fired. Amid such chaos, preparations for the biennial pushed on as hundreds of artworks arrived from overseas for their Dakar debut.

Such a precipitous pronouncement was awkward indeed. Collectors, artists, and curators from around the globe had made travel arrangements that could not be conveniently canceled. Indeed, the startlingly late postponement oddly echoed the former president’s bid to reschedule national elections.

But just as the citizens of Senegal had taken to the streets in defense of democracy, the creative community banded together in solidarity for the arts, announcing more than 200 events across the city in the weeks that followed. The consistently frenetic, often delightful, occasionally rigorous compilation of exhibitions, panels, and parties that followed marked a watershed moment in the autonomous momentum of African contemporary art.

Activities were swiftly organized through a newly created Instagram handle #theoffison, which was subsequently changed to #thenonoffison, indicative of the feisty spontaneity fueling the event. Pop-up public spaces of all kinds offered a study in contrast to the austerity of the former Palais de Justice, which had served as the official biennial’s center of gravity in past years. Venues ranged from large, state-affiliated cultural centers to unique nooks of the metropolis—an elite all-women’s social club with prime waterfront real estate, for example, that was nearly impossible to locate amid new construction and abandoned vehicles.

This non-biennial—with many exhibitions remaining on view through September—significantly differs from the previous 14 Dak’Arts. “I attended [the biennial] two years ago and had an idea of the quality and commitment of the spaces,” artist Zohra Opoku remarked. “It was almost not recognizable that the main venue of the Dak’Art Biennial was not part of it.”

If Dak’art originated, in part, to destabilize the divide between center and periphery, this latest iteration extended this gesture a step farther. What could be less destabilizing than a non-off-non-Biennial at a center of the art world’s Global South?

Amid the panoply of artistic media represented by the #thenonoffison, there was a pronounced trend for photography, video, and textile work. Indeed, video and photography were often creatively overlaid on fabric or other nontraditional materials. The Dakar-based nonprofit Raw Material mounted a solo exhibition for Opoku, “With Every Fiber of (my) Being,” that featured African textiles trailing off the edge of large-scale photographic prints. The show was accompanied by a standing-room-only roundtable discussion with the artist addressing the significance of fabric in the development of African contemporary art. In this conversation, Opoku highlighted the specificity of the Ghanaian textile tradition as it related to her own diasporic identity. Other panelists addressed significant ways in which textile traditions differed among African national contexts. Opoku remarked that such nuanced discussions of textile work “is not a priority in educational systems in the West.” Indeed, The DYI exuberance of the #nonoffison would be difficult to portray through images alone: you had to be in Senegal.  

Another major nonprofit in Dakar, Black Rock Senegal, mounted the ambitious exhibition “Encounters” to showcase work created over the past two years by artists participating in their Dakar-based residency program. Black Rock’s founder, American artist Kehinde Wiley, was embroiled in sexual assault charges soon after the opening of the show, yet this all seemed to have no bearing on his simultaneous solo exhibition at the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, a highlight of #nonoffison. The exhibition of the Black Rock residency spanned four large galleries and several makeshift screening alcoves, featuring dozens of photographic image transfers onto cloth, brick, stone, aluminum, and plastic. Had wall texts been provided, such diverse approaches to materializing visual concepts might have been more affecting. Yet the exhibition’s strength in exploring the relationship between photography and materiality represented a turn away from the figurative painting and sculpture practices that dominated earlier Dak‘Art iterations.

This is not to say that traditional artistic media were not represented, or that the history of Senegalese art was not brought in conversation with the latest trends. One of the most elegant venues of the #thenonoffison was the house of Ousmane Sow, an artist renowned for his large-scale figurative sculptures crafted from humble materials such as mud, resin, and burlap. Sow, often called the “Rodin of Senegal,” leveraged intimate knowledge of the human body from years of working as a physical therapist to create his monumental forms, now on permanent display in the house-cum-studio-cum-museum that the artist built with his own hands. For #thenonoffison, the contemporary Senegalese painter Aliou “Badu” Diack was invited to show a body of work that responded to Sow’s legacy. This took the form of the exhibition “Pilgrimage,” a series of abstract paintings made from organic pigments assembled on the inside walls surrounding Sow’s house, inviting the viewer to pay homage to the sculpture through a circumambulatory pilgrimage of sorts.

“Pilgrimage” was supported by the Dakar-based OH Gallery, which presented two of the finest exhibitions of the #thenonoffison in its commercial space: solo shows by veteran Senegalese artists Viyé Diba and Soly Cissé. For “Textile Archives,” Diba adorned large-scale panels with hundreds of delicately assembled cocoons of recycled cloth punctuated by bands of frill-like fabric scraps reminiscent of the boucherie carpet tradition. Such compositions relate to the artist’s longstanding interest in global resource management as well as the centrality of textiles to religious traditions across Africa. Bereft of such context, however, the buoyancy and grace of these abstractions suggest butterflies that might alight at any moment.

OH Gallery simultaneously showcased Cissé’s charcoal drawings in “The Lost World,” a monochrome quagmire of haunted figures assembled in horror vacui netherworlds. As the artist’s practice evolved, we witness a transition from this early work to a Twomblyesque vocabulary of anxious mark-making and inscrutable linguistic fragments. I was not alone in appreciating Cissé’s sensibility—an academic couple from the US purchased a small piece within the first ten minutes of their visit to the gallery.

Unlike many biennials, where the works on view cannot be bought, #thenonoffison was a selling event. I was told on several occasions by evidently relieved artists and gallery owners that the initiative had been a financial success.

The Paris-based gallerist Christophe Person spoke to me about his initial disappointment given that one of his artists, Ghizlane Sahli had been selected for the official ON portion of the Biennial, and had spent “an enormous amount of energy preparing the installation to be shown.” However, after reaching out to other would-be biennial participants and recognizing that there was widespread momentum for the OFF events, Person moved ahead with a six-person group show that paired Sahli’s exquisite textile works with painting and photography from across West Africa.

If the official biennial had gone as planned, Person would have shown only three artists. In his energetic curatorial reconception, he exhibited twice that number, and all six artists sold work.

Senegal’s remarkable achievements in the postcolonial African art context are indelibly linked to the liberal state support, established as a bedrock of the nation’s development by the country’s first president, Léopold Senghor. But even without state funding, #theonoffison seemed to thrive. Person and Sahli, along with many other gallerists, artists, and collectors, were familiar faces from the previous 1-54 Art Fair in Marrakesh, suggesting that withdrawal of state support did little to squash the enthusiasm of true believers. The fact that this creative ecology could thrive beyond frameworks of institutional funding would surely make Senghor proud.