Dak'Art 2006: positions and perspectives.

Dak'Art Spaces of Expression

POLLY NOOTER ROBERTS, with excerpts from an interview in Dakar on July 7, 2006, with Ousseynou Wade, Secretaire General de la Biennale de I'art contemporain.

For the past fourteen years, the Senegalese government has hosted Dak'Art: Biennale de l'art africain contemporain (The Biennial of African Contemporary Art). Dak'Art is the only ongoing biennial in sub-Saharan Africa, for although the Johannesburg Biennale was produced in 1995 and 1997, it has not been held since. The sponsors, administrators, and technicians of Dak'Art are to be heartily commended for providing an African venue to contemporary artists residing in Africa and its diasporas, permitting them to present their work to an ever-growing international audience. It is a daunting exercise to host an event of this magnitude every two years, and this amidst a global community of critics. As in all biennials and other juried exhibitions, there are inevitably artists who feel left out and resentful of those left in, curators who think they could have done things better, gallery owners looking for the commercial ramifications, politicians partaking of the publicity or wishing they could, and jaundiced observers who fail to grasp the harsh realities and brilliant resilience of postcolonial Africa. Almost every way one turns, personal, professional, nationalist, class, and other interests are at stake. But there is also a distinct need to step back and formulate broader intellectual frameworks within which to consider the many positions and perspectives Dak'Art produces.

My personal involvement with Dak'Art began in 1996 when I was invited to serve as a member of the international selection committee and to curate a solo exhibition of a southern African artist of my choice--the late, great Ezrom Legae of South Africa. That year, in addition to the international exhibition for which various countries submitted artists' dossiers as well as a Senegalese national exhibition, there were five single-artist exhibitions, each emblematic of a major region of Africa. In addition to Legae, the other solo exhibitions featured such luminaries as Moustapha Dime, Brahim Alaoui Kacimi, Pascale Marthine Tayou, and Zerihun Yetmgeta. In spite of the high quality of the artists, this approach was subject to certain criticisms, and for the next round, the Biennale incorporated African diasporas as a sixth "region" of Africa, with two of its solo exhibitions by Carrie Mae Weems of the US and Kcho (Alexis Leyva) of Cuba.

In recent years, the scientific committee has recommended that the international selection committee be replaced by a curatorial committee, which was headed this year by Monsieur Yacouba Konate a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Abidjan-Cocody and an active participant in the Biennale for many years. He appointed a formidable committee of regional co-curators that included Olabisi Silva (West Africa), Celestin Badibanga ne Mwine (Central Africa), Abdellah Karroum (North Africa), Youma Fall (Senegal), Barbara Murray (Southern Africa), Amy Horshack (the Americas), and Marie-Louise Syring (Europe). One purpose of such a geographically and professionally diverse curatorial committee was for its members to take an active role in identifying and approaching artists in addition to considering the dossiers that are sent in to the Biennale (see Viye Diba's contribution below). These are the kinds of decisions that shape each Biennale: how to define the scope of "Africa" as a constantly shifting paradigm, and how to curate a biennial of contemporary art when every aspect of that phrase is in flux. That no one is completely content with the results is in some ways the measure of successful negotiation, and criticizing Dak'Art has become an art form in its own right. And yet the hardworking administrators of the Biennale soldier on, in what can be the most trying of circumstances.

Dak'Art has always been accompanied by a conference and a publication of the international exhibition, both extremely thought-provoking and both vehicles for considering future directions. This is one of the great strengths of Dak'Art, for after each Biennale, a period of assessment leads to the conceptualization of the next round. Every edition of Dak'Art has been different in format and organization due to ongoing reflexive self-evaluation that is a gauge of the tenor and content of contemporary artistic discourse. Each Biennale also signals mercurial shifts in the artistic landscape, as when, for example, digital media arts have entered the scene in full force and installation art has taken over the landscapes of display.

Given the complexity of the undertaking, it is remarkable that the Biennale occurs every two years, on schedule--indeed, that it happens at all. Even more astonishing is that the Senegalese manage to undertake such an endeavor under such challenging conditions, for not only does a citywide event require extraordinary infrastructural management and sustained financial support, it demands the cooperation of many international entities from African, European, and diasporic countries. It requires dealing with expatriates of all stripes who may choose to understand Dakar on their terms, not its terms. And funding is never enough, nor on time; tension mounts, deadlines loom, and yet the grand show opens. Aside from the sport of constant criticism, any complaints of late installations, lost works, or how-come-him-and-not-me? must be tempered by the turnaround question: Could you do any of this nearly as well, with so little other than your own resolve?

A recent interview with Ousseynou Wade, Secretary General of the Biennale since 2002, offers considerable insight into the difficulties the Biennale routinely faces. According to Monsieur Wade, the budget for the entire Biennale this past year was no more than what an American museum might spend on a single, large-scale temporary exhibition. Of that sum, the government provided about a third, leaving the rest of the funding to be raised among international partners in a very short time frame. As M. Wade explains, it is folly to organize the Biennale on such a meager budget, especially if one considers how much the International Exhibition of 2004 required just to rent the space, plus the costs to renovate the hall, install special electrical outlets, bring the artists to Dakar, ship and insure their works, lodge official invitees, and all this added to the costs of communication and mailing, the publication, simultaneous translation at the conference and further translation of written documents, publicity, receptions, and all the rest. M. Wade had calculated an initial budget that was almost double the amount with which he quite miraculously brought Dak'Art to fruition.

In the past, the committee selected a few dozen artists from the files that were mailed to the Biennale office by their host countries. But since the implementation of a curatorial team to replace the international selection committee the costs have soared, as curators need to travel to see work and meet artists in an effort to widen the geographical scope of the event. As a result, while the number of participating artists has virtually doubled, so have the associated costs. Yet, despite such obstacles, Dak'Art has more attendees each time it is staged, with representatives and visitors coming from all over the world. The Biennale produces innumerable positive outcomes, beginning with cultural tourism. Visitors spend money while they are in Dakar, and they often return to Senegal for repeat visits. More than thirty visitors from the US attended this spring's Biennale, as well as curators, gallery owners, and critics from all over Europe and elsewhere. Many exhibitions and projects also spin out from Dak'Art each cycle, as when curators make selections for their own future exhibitions based on the Biennale's catalogue and displays. Artists also benefit in tangible ways--and these positive effects are not limited to those participating in Dak'Art's international exhibition and its "Offs" (the unofficial Biennale exhibitions and events held literally all over the city of Dakar and in outlying areas). Many artists have found their way onto the international market as a result of the Biennale, and artists have sold work during the course of Dak'Art or soon thereafter.

Another major development this year was the launching of a substantive and beautiful new journal titled afrik'arts. Dedicated to issues in African contemporary art and theory, the journal's first two issues were on art criticism and installation art, respectively, while the third is dedicated to the intellectual legacy of Leopold Sedar Senghor vis-a-vis the arts of contemporary Africa, in celebration of the centennial of the birth of the famed poet-president. The creation of this journal is significant, for as M. Wade explains, most criticism and analysis of contemporary African art has been and continues to be offered by non-Africans. Many European and American graduate students come to Dakar and other African cities to conduct research for doctoral theses on contemporary art topics. The result is that the views of Africans themselves are clouded by the commentaries of outsiders, who impose their own aesthetic discourses on African art. It is rare to hear from African professionals, he explains, which is most likely due to their lack of access to media. Through afrik'arts, M. Wade seeks to provide a space of expression for African intellectuals, encouraging them to articulate their perspectives and to create a dialogue between them and other points of view. While there are African scholars writing on art-oriented issues, they tend to be very limited geographically. There is important work coming out of Nigeria and South Africa, for instance, and there are active scholars who are linked historically to the defenders of Negritude. "Yet," states Wade,

   the discourse on identity needs to be
   revisited, reinstated, and re-envisioned
   in light of the evolution of our
   great society in the context of global
   values, afrik'arts seeks to incite and
   encourage African intellectuals to
   express themselves on issues of aesthetics
   and identity in African contemporary
   art discourse.

Dak'Art has positioned Senegal as the hub of visual arts production and critique in Africa, in much the same way that FESPACO has done for film in Ouagadougou or the Biennale of Photography in Bamako, Le Marche des Arts et Spectacles Africains in Abidjan, Le Salon International de l'Artisanat de Ouagadougou, and the Festival of Dance (which has moved from Angola, to Madagascar, to France). These are the great cultural events of today's sub-Saharan Africa, yet few of them are financed by African sources: Most rely on European or other funding. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Dak'Art is that it was founded by Senegalese artists with support from the Senegalese state, as part of a mission to promote pan-African culture and art. This is a critically important point. As M. Wade states,

   the African community must consolidate
   and support these major events
   which give to Africa an image of a continent
   that lives by its own internal
   dynamism, and which stands side by
   side with the rest of the world. Africa
   should not try to sustain a single identity
   based on a traditional notion of the
   past. It should create museums of civilization
   that emphasize historical arts,
   but right beside them it should build
   museums for contemporary arts.

The presence of contemporary art museums would provide spaces of expression for changing and exchanging contemporary identities and media, and at the same time, such institutions would ensure that some portion of African contemporary artistic production remains in Africa for posterity. If Africa supported its own major cultural events and the funding were sufficient, such events could be staged in better and more dignified conditions, and one could better assure their proper promotion and publicity, M. Wade concluded.

The presence of these major international cultural events sponsored in Africa is a barometer of the decentered yet centrifugal nature of artistic production in and out of Africa today by artists of African descent. The Dak'Art Biennale demonstrates a commitment to celebrating and offering a space of expression for the great volume of artistic energy in Africa. Dak'Art's record of publishing the Biennale catalogues and now afrik'arts journal, and of creating web offerIngs, digital labs, international conferences, and "Off" sites for emerging artists and laboratories of experimental arts, are the best evidence of an African country taking the initiative to give voice to the cultural richness and vitality of pan-African identities in the making.

The perspectives to follow are from Henry Meyric Hughes, a curator and writer on art, who this year served on Dak'Art's international jury; Carol Brown, director of the Durban Art Gallery and also a member of the international prize jury for Dak'Art this year; Viye Diba, a leading Senegalese artist who is professor at the Ecole Nationale des Arts du Senegal and has been involved with the Biennale since its inception; Steven Nelson, assistant professor of African art at UCLA; and Storm Janse van Rensburg, a freelance curator in South Africa. All were present for the opening week of Dak'Art, and each offers varying reactions to the event, detailing themes, memorable works, and perceptions of curation and installation. The texture of such a complex event is comprised of the perspectives that each visitor comes away with, yet needless to say, neither the comments of these four colleagues nor my own suffice to capture Dak'Art in all its glory. To do that, you will need to start planning your own trip to Senegal in Spring 2008.

Agreements, Allusions, and Constructive Misunderstandings

HENRY MEYRIC HUGHES

Each time Dak'Art comes round, it seems to take us by surprise, like a forgotten relative. Structures exist, but they are allowed to fall into disrepair between events; goodwill abounds, but it is all too often dissipated through inertia; the funding and personnel are there--in modest proportion, to be sure--and so is the potential, but everything is at risk, because the public is fickle and the politicians show no constancy of purpose. Then, once again, the knock comes at the door.

This year's edition, titled "Africa: Agreements, Allusions, and Misunderstandings," set out in auspicious circumstances with the appointment of the distinguished Ivorian critic and academic Yacouba Konate as chief curator and, for the first time, a supporting team of seven associate curators with an intimate knowledge of Africa and the diaspora. Then it nearly fell apart, with rumors that funds would be diverted to a major pan-African arts festival or a Senegalese cultural presentation in Paris until, all of a sudden, the event was pulled off to the satisfaction of all those whose patience had not been exhausted by last-minute anxieties and uncertainties. And by all accounts, this was a vintage Biennale, both for the quality and variety of the art and for the unprecedented arrival of 95% of the works on time, with an imposing catalogue printed in Italy for the day of the opening.

I was invited to serve on the prize jury with the Indian critic Geeta Kapoor; the director of the Durban Art Gallery, Carol Brown; and the director of the artist residency program of the Montalvo Arts Center, Gordon Knox. Three ancillary events stand out in my memory: the hairdressing salon of Michele Ka, which doubled as a stylishly decorated gallery and sculpture court for contemporary work inspired by the color and vitality of the streets; a late-night performance by the celebrated Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour in his own club, where the home-grown audience of people of all ages listened in total absorption; and a fashion parade to end all fashion parades, with the tallest and most glamorous models showing couturier-made clothes inspired by Senegalese crafts against the incongruous backdrop of a documentary about Senghor.

The poet-president's memory casts a long shadow over Dak'Art. President Abdoulaye Wade, who is widely respected for his integrity and intellect, clearly shares something of Senghor's vision of and for the arts and extends his patronage to the Biennale as a demonstration of African pride, independence, and self-assurance. This, very importantly, underpins the top-level political and economic support for the event--a government initiative--but it is not without complications in the age of globalization.

Dak'Art has a good deal going for it. It knows what it wants: a platform in Africa for contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora. And certain factors work in its favor, including the prominence given to Africa in recent years outside the commercial arena at international events like Documenta and the Venice Biennale--a trend that is likely to continue, given the high-profile presence at the opening of Dak'Art of the directors of both. This last Biennale shows flair and generosity and responds to a strongly felt need, if only it can be allowed to develop along the present lines as an alternative (like Havana) to First World cultural, political, and commercial priorities. In the absence of museums or collectors of contemporary art in the region, of art schools with adequate facilities, and of bibliographical, educational, and media resources to enable a critical discourse to develop, Dak'Art remains an essential point of encounter for people, ideas, and cultural "goods." Not least, it has the capacity to challenge some of the geographical and linguistic barriers to regional exchange and artistic dialogue with other parts of the world.

Konate and his colleagues faced up well to their responsibilities in presenting a multi-faceted panorama of work by African artists, balancing quality against variety, uncertainty against tested assumptions. Allusions to social and political events and to the victims of war, famine, and disease were inevitable and necessary. They ranged from Freddy Tsimba's (DRC) sculptures of life-size figures welded from shell cases gathered at the scenes of atrocities, to Emmanuel Eni's (Nigeria, living in Berlin) open-air performance with Israeli and Palestinian flags in front of a wall of booby-trapped oil cans. This kind of art assumes a poignant dimension because of its inability to further humanitarian values honored more in the breach than in reality.

A more distanced and frequently humorous take on local politics, corruption, and superstition was offered by "Popular Style Artists" from the DRC including Berry Matundu and Mungwa Makengle Ma, who follow in the footsteps of Cheri Samba. Related no less to Pop than to popular art were the luminous collaged silk embroideries of Billie Zangewa (Malawi, living in Johannesburg), whose visual narratives form an intimate urban diary.. And Bill Kouelany (Congo/Brazz, living in France) successfully made the transition from earlier stitched canvases to a hasty construction of simulated breeze-blocks in cardboard and wood evoking the flux of war. At the gentler end of engagement, Amadou Kane Sy (Senegal), an installation artist and veteran of Dak'Art and Documenta, displayed a large, walk-in, wire-mesh spiral festooned with small paintings of Muslims in prayer.

Amal El Kenawy (Egypt) is one of the many artists perfectly at ease in a variety of media. Her video animation The Room (2005) forms part of a more ambitious project and illustrates the freedom to experiment that some younger artists enjoy, once they have resigned themselves to (or indulged themselves in) detachment from the commercial market. This work is accompanied by Sufi music and explores the world of illusion versus her memories of reality. In its gentle emotions, this intimate work is far removed from the hard-hitting videos of Ingrid Mwangi (Kenya, living in Germany), which use the body to investigate the violent tensions between her background and her experience of Western society. The videos mount an assault on stereotypes of race and collective identity, but the earliest work is best for being less overtly didactic and schematic than her recent collaborations with Robert Hutter.

Inevitably, some of the most intriguing work in the Biennale took up a questioning position, instead of responding to stereotypical perceptions of what "African" art should purport to show. This was certainly true of the two major international prize-winners, Mounir Fatmi (Morocco, living in Tangiers, Paris, and Amsterdam) and Claudia Cristovao (Angola, living in Holland), who sought to demonstrate that "Allusions" and "Misunderstandings" could be more productive than "Agreements."

Art from the diaspora was somewhat quirkily represented. William Pope-L's (USA) installation, The Whole Entire World, which strives, made up of hundreds of small and, apparently, random snapshots of Dakar, has no linking narrative other than geography and the image, or memory of the human body; while Louis Cameron's (USA) colorful abstract paintings derived from corporate logos had everything to do with American consumerist society and nothing to do with Africa. Keith Piper (Malta/UK) was unaccountably missing from the exhibition though not the catalogue, but a number of other "landmark" artists were present, including Sole Cissy (Senegal) and El Anatsui Brahim (Ghana), recently exhibited in "Africa Remix."

Eleven prizes, including the two most prestigious awards, carried no restrictions, while others were reserved for Senegalese artists or for artists of a certain age or working in a given medium, such as one for the Salon of Design at the Maison de la Culture Douta Seck, this year awarded to painter and designer Khalifa Ababcar Dieng (Senegal). The financial rewards for the winners of even the smaller prizes are certainly worthwhile, but the prestige of winning a prize most probably outweighs such benefit. Of particular interest to this year's contenders were the eleven separately administered and adjudicated residencies in all parts of the world, on offer from the Montalvo Arts Center's Res Artis program based in California.

This year's works in Dak'Art were distributed across a small number of centrally situated museums, galleries, and open spaces and presented to acceptable international standards, most often by the artists themselves with curatorial assistance. Even the technical side--so often a problem--was adequately taken care of at the time of the opening, with the result that video and video installations merged with work in other media. Video and digital art were the focus of a separate exhibition and seminar organized by UNESCO and the Fondation Daniel Langlois (Canada), and there was a series of talks and discussions in the opening week, backed up by the second issue of the Biennale's promising new bilingual art magazine afrik'arts and the daily journal of the Biennale edited by its general secretary, Ousseynou Wade and financed by Africalia. These moves in the direction of public debate, personal encounters, and communication on different levels, while not new, are of great significance for the future development of the Biennale--especially in a context that is largely devoid of round-the-year institutional activity. Yet this triumph over the odds only partially masked the fragility of the infrastructure: Rumors abounded of the lack of funds to pay for the artists' travel and transport costs, or even for the return of their works, at a time when urgent consideration should also, arguably, be given to the possibility of assisting artists with production costs, engaging an adequate number of technicians and helpers to assist with the preparations, and building an institutional archive and memory. The potential of this event to generate tourism, a public, and even an international market for the artists' work is enormous, but has yet to be adequately appraised; likewise, the need to build new partnerships with the private sector. The Biennale, to survive, needs an injection of something more than faith and goodwill and cannot be left to government initiatives alone.

A Global Africa at Dak'Art 7

CAROL BROWN

In the grounds of the faded grandeur of the Art Deco building of the Musee de la Place Soweto is an enfilade of stable-like spaces. One of these is an unfinished open-beamed structure with a strut dividing it visually into two areas. The floor is rough and marked. It is a space outside of the main venues designated for the Biennale and thus on the periphery.

One of the Dak'Art artists, Claudia Cristovao, selected this space, which was largely ignored by other exhibitors, to show her multiple channel video installation Fata Morgana or The Mirage, where people who were born in Africa but left as children during the years of African independence from colonial rule were asked to describe their memories and projections. An imaginary country emerges from these stories, not any one "real" country but one "global Africa" as real in each person's mind as it is impossible to find on any map. Surrounding five small, intimate screens recording the individual interviews is a large projection of a Namibian "ghost town"--a community built during the diamond rush and deserted almost immediately by the prospectors searching for a more promising area. This town is slowly being swallowed by the colored desert sands, which stand for the shifting sands of memory and the projections of the interviewees who speak in Portuguese with French subtitles.

After the grand prize-giving ceremony, where Christovao was recipient of one of the major prizes, I was approached by an English-speaking fellow South African curator who had trouble understanding the piece. It then became apparent that we, as members of the jury, were mainly Francophone and therefore the Portuguese and French used in the interview structure was clear. However this use of language (prevalent in the many multimedia pieces) set up barriers for many viewers. For me, this incident was key in the context of this biennale, whose theme was "Afrique: Entendues, sous-entendus et malentendus," officially and loosely translated in the catalogue as "Africa: Agreements, Allusions, and Misunderstandings." The notion of an "African" contemporary art is as problematic as the notion of an African identity. In this age of globalization there is now a biennale style of art. Many of the exhibitors are familiar names on the international biennale circuit whether it be in Venice, Istanbul, Valencia or Cairo. The overall theme focusing on the continent has inherent problems.

Africa is a complex and large continent with fifty-odd countries, where languages and cultural practices are many and channels of communication are generally poor. Until recently, a person who wanted to travel from South Africa to Dakar had to fly to Europe and then back again to Africa. That in itself was a symbolic journey, where to discover one's own continent meant doing so via Europe. Maybe it is still a bit like that--many "African" exhibitors are residents of France, Holland, and the US, while most of their work is involved in examining issues of identity and the histories which they are trying to recuperate. At least a third of the exhibits of Dak'Art 2006 were digitally based, flying in the face of the stereotypes of Africa that are still held by many of the prominent Western collectors and curators who visited the Biennale hoping to capture some of the African romanticism demonstrated by many of the exhibiting artists. This romanticism was manifested by the incorporation of elements such as recycled materials, soil surrounding the exhibits, African print fabrics, and references to "traditional" art forms or materials--practices that have successfully and calculatedly brought many African artists into the international arena. El Anatsui's work was an outstanding example of departure from these stereotypes, his use of aluminum bottle tops and copper wire raising these materials to the level of a transformative experience. His painstaking method of stitching together the discarded pliable bottle tops, piece by piece, produced a large-scale theatrical object that folds and unfolds like a curtain, claiming a dramatic space and asserting a dominant position. The artwork suggests West African traditions of sewing opulent cloth into ritual garments which, when worn in particular ceremonies, linked the living and dead. The sense of scale, drama, and history in this work created a spiritual experience from a twenty-first century African city's debris.

To return to the overall theme, for me the whole of the show did not equal the sum of its parts. The structure of a biennale can be problematic in that the idea of multiple venues is designed primarily for a general survey rather than a curated show. The Venice Biennale was originally conceived as a symbol of the carving up of Europe into nation states, and the idea of discrete national pavilions persisted for many years. Biennales now often serve as tools for the promotion of cultural tourism and occur in cities where art is moribund between such events.

The idea of the exhibition itself as a work of art is one that has gained currency in the last few years, but is often neglected in international shows about African art that have suffered from the "survey" syndrome. The Dakar Biennale, being a large-scale show about African art in Africa, lost the opportunity to make a studied and coherent statement. Works seemed to be placed without consideration of the relationships between them, and thus the opportunity to set up dialogues and visual connections was lost. Due mainly to problems with funding, many curators and artworks arrived in a haphazard manner, often at the eleventh hour, creating a situation in which spaces, instead of being planned and prescribed, were chosen by those who either happened to arrive on the turf first or who shouted the loudest.

Dak'Art 7 succeeded, then, primarily as an event and only secondarily as a curated exhibition. This is, after all, the most sustainable biennale on the continent, and one that provides a unique space for the coming together of African art and its assessment. It brings the world to Africa rather than bringing Africa to the world.

Dak'Art 2006: A View from the Inside

VIYE DIBA

Among the recommendations of the scientific committee after the 2004 edition of Dak'Art was the creation of an advisory board to replace the scientific committee and the naming of a General Commissioner (chief curator) to replace the international selection committee. The debate about replacing a scientific council with an advisory board was more about appropriateness than about a change from one kind of structure to another. University faculty who were members of the council stressed the rigorous nature of its work, hence the notion of "scientific." This word bothered the artists, however, for they preferred to emphasize the emotional side of their work. Such a seemingly harmless debate illustrates the types of questions raised within the earlier structure.

The choice of a general commissioner rather than an international selection committee was motivated by the necessity to ameliorate the process of choosing artists by establishing direct contact with or knowledge of them, for often the more indirect submission of visual materials (slides, photographs, and other media) did not reflect the real quality of the works and led to disappointment. The purpose of naming a commissioner was to subject the selected artists to a general review, and it was up to the artists to be convincing about the pertinence of their work.

These two decisions having now been realized, what can be said in the aftermath of the 2006 edition of Dak'Art? At the very least we should compare this Biennale with the preceding one in order to identify progress, the persistence of certain negative features, the experiments and imperfections. Let us first recall a point of history.

As one of the principal creators of this Biennale through the Senegalese National Association of Plastic Artists (ANAPS), I should offer several observations to illuminate its past. The Biennale was originally the idea of Senegalese artists, an idea that was supported by a State willing to see to its realization. It has become a powerful instrument of cultural politics in the domain of visual arts. Through its longevity and regularity, the Biennale has become the best known and most prestigious project in contemporary arts in all of Africa--an opportunity for international positioning by many professional artists, a space of competition for cultural personalities seeking international recognition. There is no shortage of debate about its mandate, its lack of support, and its autonomy versus control by the State, but this simply illustrates the stakes hidden in the institution itself. Above all, it would be naive to ignore this fact.

Recently, during an exhibition of my work at the Casa Encendida in Madrid, I was harangued by a great African artist who said that the Biennale of Dakar has become an African event that has escaped from the hands of Africans to become a sort of machine, serving vacationers who know little about Africa and spend a few days of cultural tourism in Dakar, or by those who have built their careers on the backs of African artists. My response to this provocative artist was that he is as responsible as I am to change things if what he declares seems true to him. His point of view is shared by many people, but it basically proves the importance of this event.

Let us return to the issue at hand. The Biennale of 2004 allows us to appreciate what happened in 2006. The heart of the Biennale has shifted back to the IFAN Museum on Soweto Square and the middle of the city, permitting easier circulation among the official exhibitions, all located within easy reach of each other, contrary to the "fair" of Dakar that characterized the Biennale's 2004 edition, held out of town in a structure called CICES--eccentric in access and difficult to manage.

Some eighty-eight artists were selected for Dak'Art 2006, of whom about a dozen presented digital works, as opposed to the 2004 Biennale, half of which comprised digital works. Such a massive digital presence had provoked a vividly negative response from the public. This year the works arrived mostly on time, as opposed to 2004, when the works of certain artists were not even in the room when their exhibition opened. The quality of the catalogue far exceeds that of 2004, and was published in time for the opening of the Biennale. The 2006 Biennale also included a debate about market prices and an excellent presentation on digital arts, supported by UNESCO. And to this list must also be added an appreciation of the organizational and artistic quality of the "Off" or unofficial exhibitions.

Nonetheless, beside these positive points deep problems persist, from the generally weak quality of the Salon du Design to the grave difficulties with the layout and production of the International Exhibition. The latter was due, in my opinion, to the quantity of works, which exceeded the available space; serious logistical problems; and a dearth of qualified personnel. Design and installation should be a spatial creation based upon the artistic contributions. Worst of all for me was the apparent absence of directorial authority concerning operations--a problem of management.

Reporting on the press conference announcing the commissioners' selection of works for Dak'Art 2006, the daily newspaper Le Soleil mentioned the Biennale's emphasis on artists of the 1960s and of the Internet Age--a term frequently used these days ("Africa Remix"; the Lyon Biennale preferred the phrase "Generation 2000"). This desire to bridge the 1960s and the 2000s is quite evident in the Lyon Biennale of 2005, but that the Biennale of Dakar should adopt such an orientation seems paradoxical to me. In 1960 it was difficult to speak of contemporary art in many African countries, and it was only a valid topic in Senegal and one or two other places. Such a strategy--confronting the years of independence and this world of cultural diversity marked by audiovisual dominance and globalization--seems to view the whole world through the single lens of equal opportunity, twisting around the fundamental ideas at play. Without doubt, Africa is caught up in globalization, but globalization is not the issue since Africa has no choice about it; instead, the problem is to define the stakes tied to this term. A continent that only transforms 5-10% of its own cotton into cloth, yet possesses one of the richest textile traditions in the world; a continent whose figures for demographic growth are among the highest in the world; a continent with half the world's population of people living with AIDS; a continent where less then 20% of the population possesses more than 80% of the means of communication: In such a continent the notion of equal opportunity has an altogether different significance.

The substance of this debate rests on the extraordinary trampling of intellectual thought in Africa in pre- and post-independence years by an intelligentsia that is reactionary and self-congratulatory. When will initiative be produced and appreciated?

As for the mode of selection, what is the margin of responsibility of the General Commissioner vis-a-vis his or her assistants? If the selection is based on the quality of artists esteemed because they are already well known, where will surprises and positive discoveries be found? What is being selected, the artist or the work? This question arises because I know examples of well-known artists who put nothing into their work and yet are chosen. In certain cases no defensible reason exists for a work to be presented in an important event like the Biennale except the unexamined reputation of the artist. Previously, when the quality of a submitted work was in doubt, the former international selection committee considered earlier works by the artist, and this strikes me as pertinent. It suggests a great ambiguity in the 2006 selection process in which two systems were used, one through direct contact with artists and the other through dossiers that motivated a commissioner's choice. This hybrid character of selection seems paradoxical and does not help clarify things. The risk of the system of commissioners is that it can also favor insider networks and neglect those artists who have had little chance to augment their careers or visibility in the art world. For the sake of objectivity, we must mitigate these tendencies.

Recalling Dak'Art

STEVEN NELSON

Dak'Art 2006 began in early May with a whirl of parties, speeches, and openings. With 4 official venues and 116 unofficial sites to choose from, it was easy to spend weeks in Dakar and do nothing but see art. Like any exhibition, Dak'Art's fare, official and unofficial, was uneven. However, compared to the last Biennale I visited, in 2002, the general quality of the work has been vastly improved. While Dak'Art is indeed a survey of African art, there were some themes that seemed to engage the curatorial team more than others.

Although this has been the case in African art for years, artists and curators alike have been attracted to the African cityscape as mirror and metaphor of social relations. Like their photographic counterparts in the current Okwui Enwezor blockbuster "Snap Judgments" at the International Center of Photography in New York, a number of artists included in Dak'Art took urban space--as spectacle and as problem--as the foundation of their production. The Senegalese artist Babacar Niang's installation Urban Congestion is a meditation on Dakar's traffic, crowded conditions, and filth. The city's visual disorder is a metaphor for its social and moral decay. On a formal level, the artist would have improved his work by leaving out the dirt (a material overused by Senegalese artists) liberally spread under and around the used bottles that anchor his metal television antennae. Examining similar themes, the fragile yet intimidating figures that make up Dilomprizulike's (Nigeria) installation The Face of the City cast postcolonial African urban space and its exponential growth as metaphors for alienation and, like Niang's work, for moral and social collapse.

Like other biennials and European expositions of African art, urban painting la Cheri Samba was in vogue. Both Joseph Bertiers (Kenya) and Cheri Cherin (DRC) produced paintings that pit Africa as spectacle. Cherin's canvases lack the critical edge paramount in Samba's practice. Bertiers's work highlights the artist amongst an array of local, national, and international events, but again, he misses the sharp humor and satire so effectively articulated by Samba.

However, Bertiers explores what could be thought of as the preeminent theme in the exposition: the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world. Bertiers, like a number of other artists, dealt specifically with the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center. For Dominique Zinkpe (Rep. of Benin) the event served as the basis for his installation Bush Taxi that depicts the War on Terrorism, or perhaps more appropriately, the stalemate between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, as a series of games. Most notably, the standoff between Bush and bin Laden, for the artist, is a metaphor for relations between Africa and its former colonizers, one that is played out not unlike a chess match that is still in process. Also focused on the events of September 11, the video installation by Nu Barreto (Guinea Bissau, working in France) titled I Have a Dream inserts the famous words of Martin Luther King, Jr., into the mouth of George W. Bush. Every time Bush utters the slain civil rights leader's words, some major catastrophe occurs. On a more subtle level, Taib bel Haj's (Tunisia) Marchent vet la Paix depicts a group of turtles aimlessly, slowly meandering toward a non-place.

On a more abstract plane, Senam Okudzeto (Nigeria/US, working in the UK), in her installation Capitalism and Schizophrenia, uses letters, books, glossy book covers, and text to investigate and interrogate what the artist herself calls "objects and commodities that do not exist." Highly theoretical and intellectual, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (the title itself recalls Deleuze and Guattari's classic of the same name) brings together theory and practice, for the commodities and relations Okudzeto explores have real effects in people's lives.

Of course, not all of the work in Dak'Art 2006 runs along such lines. There are also a number of artists who have mined American popular and political culture from the 1950s through the 1970s. Billie Zangewa's (South Africa) whimsical textile Getting Happy takes Frank Sinatra's 1957 fabulous and glamorous song "Come Fly with Me" to explore romance, notions of home (Johannesburg), and quotidian existence.

Other artists took American civil rights struggles and black liberation as their cues. Ndary Lo's (Senegal) installation Le Refus de Rosa Parks is a crowded and overwrought study that--through realist portraiture--connects Parks and other American civil rights luminaries to international personalities such as Sheikh Amadou Bamba, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Pablo Picasso (!), among others. The portraits surround a sculptural installation of the bus where Rosa Parks refused to sit in back. Above the viewers hang chains. As in Niang's piece, there is too much going on. Moreover, Lo's work does not have the evocative force of the more immediate and powerful murals of the Dakar street artist Papisto Boy, which may be an obvious reference for Lo's current work. Mounir Fatmi's (Morocco) installation Getting Out of History explores the history of the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims and wonders why they lost their strength in the 1970s. Fatmi also connects these histories and the melancholia attached to their waning to issues concerning African liberation and decolonization.

Aside from the opportunity to see what artists of African descent (particularly those not working in the West) are doing, Dak'Art provides equally valuable opportunities for artists, curators, collectors, scholars, critics, and students to meet and greet. I generally complain that in exhibitions such as these, everyone is so busy whining about African logistics and the lack of organization as well as musing about the weirdness of being in Africa in the first place, that no one actually talks about the art in the show. In terms of conference presentations and the exhibition's propaganda and official rhetoric--which is stunningly stable--this is true. However, in unofficial venues, in conversations over drinks, and in arguments over food, people talked at length about the work on display, about its formal qualities, about artist intention, and about viewer response. For a failed artist turned art historian, this was gold. Pure gold.

Art Routes: Negotiating Dak'Art

STORM JANSE VAN RENSBURG

I can only recount the experience of Dak'Art through anecdotal impressions. It is impossible to filter the powerful impact of the city of Dakar, the bumbling bureaucracy of Biennale organizers, and the technical incompetence of its installation, from a critical reading and analysis of the event.

I do not consider this a negative experience per se, nor level it as criticism. Sometimes things are what they are. Dak'Art, and the negotiation of its programs, is not a neutral affair and it does not function in a controlled environment. Everyday life in this contemporary urban city intrudes to provide a visceral, fragmented, and complex viewing experience, making for a rewarding discovery of contemporary African art production today.

The disorganization of the Dak'Art Biennale is legendary and, as far as I can ascertain, not a single event in its history ever opened with all the works arrived and installed by the opening day. This year was no exception, and at the official opening on May 5, 2006, at the IFAN Musee d'art Africain, open crates were scattered everywhere, building and painting were frantically carrying on, and a number of artists' works were lying on the floor. This includes the installations of luminaries Frederic Bruly Bouabre and Abdoulaye Konate. I know of three artists, Andrew Tshabangu, Robin Rhode, and Kudzanai Chiurai, whose work either had not arrived or was not installed when I left Dakar on May 10.

Regardless of these distractions, many works at both IFAN and the Galerie National d'Art stood up to scrutiny. Works by Kori Newkirk (Diaspora/US) and Mounir Fatmi (Morocco) provided interesting if convergent perspectives. Newkirk's video projection Bixel is an almost irreverent choreography of a twirling and bobbing body, dressed in silver lame briefs and oozing glitter, born of a US-specific politics of race and sexuality. Fatmi's installation Getting out of History, in contrast, provided a searching outsider's documentary probe into the history of the Black Panther movement in the US. While it might be unfair to play these works against each other, the contextual collision cannot be ignored.

At the same venue visitors were greeted by a single-screen projection titled God Is Design by Adel Abdessemed (Algeria), an animation consisting of merging and morphing graphic symbols, lines and shapes in a steady rhythm. While maintaining an ordered sequence, the work simultaneously questions this order, threatening to come apart at any moment. Another work down the hallway with a similarly critical view of religious iconography was Premonition of War (Scapegoat) by Wim Botha (South Africa).

A compelling installation of seven large canvases (part of a monumental series) by Pelagie Gbaguidi (Rep. of Benin), Le Code Noir at the Galerie National d'Art, was an evocation of the horror of colonialism. In what is an ongoing project, Gbaguidi processes impulses of collective consciousness through evocative gestural drawings executed while in a state of trance. Derived from the racist text by Louis XIV with the same title, the work also operates on the level of exorcism, a proposal for healing.

The multivalent contributions by these artists, as well as those by Anawana Haloba (Zambia), Soly Cisse (Senegal), Claudia Cristavao (Angola), El Anatsui (Ghana), and Aime Mpane (DRC), are a few of many works by artists who contributed to a complex interrogation of global political and social frameworks, while maintaining an engaged discourse with the issues of Africa.

The dynamic fringe program, "Dak'Art Off," provided some gems if one managed to wade through the many curio shop listings and nonexistent installations. I spent precious hours trying to locate exhibitions, once with a very helpful if not overly committed taxi driver who refused to give up. The more I begged, "Please take me back to the hotel" in guidebook French, the more I realized that my newly acquired language skills were inadequate, or else that the very helpful taxi driver only spoke Wolof. Held hostage for an entire afternoon, I tried to convince myself that it is the journey and not the destination that is important. We never found the venue.

The process of negotiating the Biennale and its programs invariably resulted in these complicated interactions with taxi-drivers, officials, street vendors, con men, and self-styled guides. Not speaking French is a serious disadvantage. Although the Biennale is famed as an excellent networking opportunity, the language divide can hinder getting to know the other teams, split into Francophone/Anglophone camps. As a result, most of my interaction with the Senegalese population and members of Francophone Africa were non-art-related encounters with people met when leaving the hotel, traveling to the exhibition halls, buying mineral water, or exchanging money.

A project by a South African based art collective, the Trinity Session, sought to engage the physical and social geography of Dakar by circumventing official/tourist access into, and experience of, the city. Prior to arriving in Dakar for a residency at Ker Thiossane, its members, Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter, collaborated with Senegalese living in Hillbrow, Johannesburg: Members of this small and marginalized immigrant community provided personal mappings and anecdotal descriptions of "home," which Hobbs and Neustetter accessed to negotiate the city when they arrived, following and documenting idiosyncratic routes. These extraordinary documents and experiences were formed into a video installation and wall drawings. The project completes on its return to Johannesburg, where a presentation will be made to the Senegalese community to bring messages from home. It is a project that speaks eloquently about dislocation, but also about rich social engagements within "foreign" spaces.

Another highlight in the "Off" was GawLab, a Dakar-based collective of cultural agents and artists who presented a new media showcase at a popular restaurant and bar, Pen'Art Jazz Club. A collaboration between artists and software developers, the collective presented proposals for new ways to explore the Internet as a tool for art work, as well as ingenious ways of presenting such work publicly. Working from an African vantage point, this groundbreaking initiative provides new platforms for exploration and experimentation.

Attending the conference accompanying the main program, which was mostly conducted in French, I had the nagging sense of receiving a watered-down version of things, with bad, fuzzy translations provided by the particularly poor language services. However, that being said, seminal issues of contemporary art in Africa were much more rigorously discussed and debated than one would find in Southern Africa. I left with the distinct feeling of witnessing an extraordinary creative collision of critical minds and processes. And while difficulties with technical and bureaucratic delivery and the singular lingua franca might have brought an ironic twist to the theme of the exhibition, "Africa: Agreements, Allusions and Misunderstandings," it is for certain that Yacouba Konate, the chief curator, had achieved a complex and powerful realization in the 7th Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art.