Kara Blackmore, Curator of Urban Room, School for the Creative and Cultural Industries, UCL
One of Africa’s most important art shows, the 15th Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar – also known as Dak'Art – is currently on in Senegal. A biennale is a major international exhibition held every two years. The theme for 2024 is The Wake – L’Éveil and this year there’s a strong focus on trauma, people and the planet.
Kara Blackmore is an anthropologist and curator who specialises in community-driven exhibition making. She’s also a associate curator – one of the team of women who are responsible for artist selection and exhibition making – at this year’s biennale. She told us about the work and about creating healing spaces during a harsh time in history.
Why is the Dakar Biennale important?
The Dakar Biennale is one of the most prestigious events for contemporary African art. It’s also one of the oldest, staged officially since 1992.
Anyone who has been to the biennale will know that it’s a momentous gathering of artists, curators, academics and cultural professionals. But this edition is especially unique in its form of generosity and inclusion. Everything is free and open to the public.
This biennale is important for art ecosystems. It is an occasion where the heritage of arts and culture is celebrated and a time when people flock from across the globe to feel the aliveness of a continent and its diasporas.
The Dakar Biennale is the only government-funded biennale in Africa. In a global context where art funding is continually being restricted, and a setting where aid funders serve as cultural surrogates for national arts funding, it is really inspiring to see that Senegal is so invested.
In this edition we’ve pushed the boundaries of Pan-Africanism, linking artists across the globe and marking deep connections between creative practices and ecological crisis.
Could you walk us through the main shows? What can visitors see?
The old Palace of Justice on the coastal plateau of Dakar is the main venue for the biennale. It’s a vast space with a main courtyard that has been filled with grand sculptural works from artists such as Sonia Elizabeth Barrett (Jamaica), Sokari Douglas Camp (Nigeria) and Siwa Mgoboza (South Africa).
Then the viewer can follow different chapters of the exhibition along the corridors of the once-used offices now turned into galleries. The lyrical flow moves between water (Swimming in the Wake), land (Dive into the Forest), air (Float in the Clouds) and the destructive reality of our impact on the ecosystem (Burn).
Light and colour guide audiences between the rooms of work by nearly 50 contemporary artists. For the time of the biennale, this old courthouse is transformed from a ruin to a living labyrinth of creativity.
What’s behind this year’s themes?
There are many curatorial visions coming together in this edition of the biennale. Rather than working on a hierarchy of a single artistic director and different curators with distinct roles we wanted to create a synergy that was built into the ethos of how the other curators (Salimata Diop, Cindy Olohou, Marynet Jeannerod) and I came together to shape the scenographic (staging) collaboration with the architecture and design firms (Clemence Farrell and Studio Abdou Diouf).
In fact, the ideas that shaped the biennale began with a collective of artists and curators called Eaux Fortes (Strong Water) who were working on a show that focused on ecological issues like climate catastrophe and extractivism.
It is from this gathering of women that the central part of the biennale, the exhibition We Will Stop When the Earth Roars, was born, with artists Laeïla Adjovi, Beya Gille Gacha, and Cléophée R.F. Moser. As co-curators we then worked to invite more artists and to expand this theme of the consequences of social and environmental violence.
For me it was vital to have artists whose works are tender, intimate and give a human scale to perspectives of crisis. I believe that, in this way, connections can be built to be a form of repair.
It is in this perspective that we see the inclusion of artists like Manuela Lara, Wolff Architects, Louisa Marajo, Fabiana-Ex-Souza, Mouawad + Laurier, Moufouli Bello and Némo Camus. The audience can then have moments to take a breath between the rage and the confrontation with urgent ecological collapse.
What messages are the Dakar Biennale artists sending?
We see this biennale as a manifesto, as a refusal to be silenced. So, it’s not about an instrumental messaging of artists but more an emotive, sensory experience that moves the visitor. The feelings one has in the exhibition means that visitors can’t look away but also that they are cared for as they confront the realities of extractivism, neocolonialism, waste and consumption.
There is texture to the show that creates a material relationship to our manifesto as more than a loud cry or wake up, showing a multitude of approaches to redressing bodily and environmental harm.
An example is the grand prize-winning installation of Agnés Brezephin (Martinique), whose Fil(s) de soi (e) shows a body filled with threads, buttons and embroidered objects.
Haitian artist Gina Athena Ulysse’s For Those Among Us Who Inherited Sacrifice, Rasanblaj! is made up of cowries and calabashes installed against archival texts that provides a medium for accountability to confront the legacy of transatlantic slavery.
Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s A Palace in Pieces features a work called Mountain Mama in reference to the Mau Mau, installed with an extract of Senegal’s first president Léopold Senghor’s poem Prayer for Peace created from red soil. This spreading of sifted earth leads up to a statue of the Mountain Mama matriarch presiding over the former supreme court. It is both an invitation and a confrontation. It requires the viewer to come deep into the room to meet her face-to-face.
All these installations are rooted in unique feminist practices ranging from Martinique to Haiti and Kenya and nurtured in the diaspora, like the United States. They’re connected by the creative insistence to confront legacies of violence while writing new histories of resistance and liberation.
To bring this kind of activist perspective to curating and the creative process in a biennale is a brave proposition. One that we hope is realised through our care infrastructures and the willingness of artists to engage our thematic call with their brilliant responses.
Kara Blackmore receives funding from UCL, AHRC, French Institute for the exhibition.
