Dak’art 2014: At a Crossroads

At the ARM in Dakar, 2012 (photo by Kae Amo)

Here’s an interesting review of Dak’Art 2014, the premier Africa-based art biennale that holds in Dakar Senegal. Anna Stielau, writing in the Postcolonialist, carries out an intelligent review of the divergent impulses impacting the biennale, mainly in relation to its location in Africa and aspiration towards a global concept of biennale culture. Stielau begins her analysis with a trenchant look at the 49-metre high African Renaissance Monument (Le Monument de la Renaissance Africaine), which has been shrouded in controversy since it was commissioned by Abdoulaye Wade, former president of Senegal. I remember visiting the sculpture in 2012 and not quite knowing what to make of it. Its North Korean socialist realist style is jarring in the landscape, but strangely, it remains a major tourist draw (I am reminded of the similar socialist realist aesthetic of the Martin Luther King memorial  monument in Washington DC: an interesting conjunction perhaps?).

MLK memorial monument

According to Stielau, “The Dakar Biennale or Dak’art, the oldest mega show of its kind on the African continent, is the meeting place of two ideological commitments that can make for uneasy bedfellows. As the descendent of poet, politician and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “First World Festival of Negro Arts”, the biennale is closely bound up in the rhetoric of a contemporized pan-Africanism[1]. In its most recent incarnations the event has also strategically aspired to internationalism. To extend my metaphor, Dak’art turns its gaze to the West with its feet still anchored in African soil”.

I think this issue, of Africa’s location in global space, is a major millstone around Africa’s neck, and it always manifests as an idea that Africa exists outside globality, thus subjecting its existence to a constant request to “fit in” Western concepts of the norm. To paraphrase Rasheed Araeen, “If the social, economic and political conditions of Africa are still struggling against the global hegemony of the West, how can its art [and the continent] be free from this hegemony?” Stielau’s analysis is lucid and quite intelligent, and it raises one again the question of how to engage African realities, in a context in which Western discourses always locate Africa beyond the pale.