#artkhan #artist #france🇫🇷 #love #artgallery #gallery #london #loveart #nyc #capetown #johannesburg #nigeria #dakart2016 #dubai🇦🇪 #hongkong #artoftheday #southafrica #southamerica #germany #geneva #holland #belgium #luanda #exhibition #sweden #

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”  (Italo Calvino)

After my invitation to Dakar Biennial, Italian artist Stefano Canto realized the project “Structures” a work that combines visual art and dance. The artist created a series of concrete and steel sculptures that invaded the exhibition space of the IFAN Museum like skeletons from destroyed cities, while during the performance, a group of dancers directed by the Afro-Italian choreographer, Ashai Lombardo Arop, interacted with them using the installation as an original imaginative device. 

In this work, it is the body that defines the architecture. The movements of the dancers complete the structures and architectures draw in the air reminiscent of Le Città Invisibili by Italo Calvino. 

After the performance we asked to the dancers what was the feeling about their experience. 

Fantastic!! Albeit at a very scary height #monument #Dakar #Dakart2016 #tourism #culture #history #french #happy #art #enjoyment (at African Renaissance Monument)

Superb, no? We saw work by @alexispeskine at @dak_artbiennale 2016 and we had a quick chat with him. Listen to this #howarduniversity grad at the 🔗 in the bio. #Art #Dakar #dakart2016 #senegal #africa #hbcu

Could we call this African dance? Guest curator Sumesh Sharma (India) organized a performance to mark the opening of his group show at the Musée de l'IFAN during the Dak'Art Biennale 2016 in which five artists engaged with one another under the theme "India's Quest for Power 1966-1982." If the utopic dreams of solidarity among non-aligned countries in the postcolonial era have largely proven bunk, Bollywood at least has made significant inroads across the continent and has been assimilated into the African collective consciousness...

Just don’t lean against the walls

I’m on a bus parked in front of the Musée Théodore Monod, Place Soweto, better known as the Muséé de l’Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire (IFAN). Thanks to a wireless connection I can blog from anywhere, which I would be doing more often if images didn’t take so long to load. I’m working on it. In the meantime, you’ll find my photos on my Facebook page.

The opening ceremony got under way a bit late this morning. Here, punctuality would be surprising. Disconcerting, even. Things move “sénégalaisement”—that is, at the pace of a long and thorough greeting. Buul yakamti. Ne te presse pas. No need to rush. The beauty of each event reveals itself in the interstice between here and there, between now and then, between mine and yours. I learned long ago that it’s only in suppressing my impulse to impose an order on my days here that I find myself in precisely the right place at the right time.

While loitering in the courtyard of the IFAN museum, for example, drinking in the green of the rare grass and the refined date trees in this quiet corner of the city, I had the chance to say hello to Joe Ouakam, the undisputed guru of Senegal’s art scene.

Joe, the founder of Agit-Art was born Issa Samb in December of 1945. It was the year that many tirailleurs sénégalais having fought to liberate France came home to the unbearable hypocrisy of a colonized Senegal, where asking for the recompense that had been promised them—a meager veterans’ pension—could get them massacred by their “mother” country. Earlier that same year, eleven months before Issa/Joe came into this world, my favorite filmmaker of all time, Djibril Diop Mambety, had arrived, and the two extraordinary friends would later work alongside other artists and writers to agitate the cultural scene as early as 1970 through provocative works and collective actions that radically broke with Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude, the reigning cultural imperative of the time.

I think I’ve always been a bit in love with Joe, and have secretly always wanted to be loved back. Today when he put his arm around me to pose for a picture, I held him like a father and thanked him deeply in my heart for the warm embrace.

It was while the guest curators were introducing the concept behind each of their shows, addressing the spectators from the balcony of the annex gallery, that Joe arrived on the scene from behind the crowd and announced his presence with a loud call-and-response sort of greeting, signaling the true launch of the event with his authoritative disruption. I couldn’t hear a word of what the curators had been saying, but Joe’s words, carried by the strong Atlantic breeze, found their way straight to my gut. Voilà, I thought. Le grand est là. On entre du coup dans le vrai.

On the ground floor of the gallery, guest curator Sumesh Sharma (India) had asked his artists to tape and paste their works directly to the walls. No frames, no fuss. No little foamboard card indicating the artist’s name and the title of each piece, as we are accustomed to finding in any exhibition. As to who did what, your guess is pretty much as good as mine.

Follow this link to see the images.

The dividing walls that the carpenters had finished just hours before the official opening were painted in the sublime sky blue referenced in the Biennale’s theme: La Cité dans le jour bleu, a reference to Senghor’s 1940 poem “Au Guélowâr,” which he wrote while detained in a German prison camp during the war.  Rounding a corner, I made the happy mistake of touching one of these walls and came away from the encounter with sticky blue fingertips.

C’est parfait, I thought. J’y ai laissé mes empreintes. I will have left a trace after all.

About to shoot my brother Gygy's music video FRIDAY NIGHTS for the next 2 days with the beautiful Nafissatou Gningue and my boy Bayano. Let's go Dakar! #dakart2016 #senegal #gygy #cenestpasnimportequi #africa #dakar #music #family #92 #issy

Comment: alexispeskine said "Ndeye Thiam! #africanwomenrock #dakart2016 #raftofmedusa #senegal #africa #ngor #yayefall #bayefall"

Ndeye Thiam! #africanwomenrock #dakart2016 #raftofmedusa #senegal #africa #ngor #yayefall #bayefall

Comment: alexispeskine said "Ndeye Thiam has a powerful voice and life story! Met her in Ngor at the restaurant that she put together from literally nothing after leaving an abusive wedding. One day I recorded her singing a praise that became the theme of my film Raft of Medusa. Tonight, to thank her my brother and I decided to record her at her house with her choir of young girls, so that people of our World may hear her voice. I wish her to live up to the greatness that the Universe has destined for her. #raftofmedusa #dakart2016 #senegal #africa #ngor"