African creativity meets at the Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar

Mamadou Boy Diallo is busy these days with paint cans, planks and various gadgets.

He is preparing a small canoe with phrases alluding to the migratory phenomenon with the idea of ​​mounting it on a cart and taking it through the streets of the Medina neighborhood in the Senegalese capital.

Like him, hundreds of artists are finishing his works for the Dakar Biennial of Contemporary African Art, which opened this Friday and returns with its usual drive after the forced break in 2020 due to covid-19.

The old Palace of Justice will host the proposals of the 59 creators of the official section, but dozens of cultural centers, galleries, restaurants and venues in this dynamic city dress up to host the proposals of 450 artists in the so-called

festival .

An explosion of creativity.

Under the motto Ndaffa, which in Serer, one of the languages ​​of Senegal, means "forge" or "forge" but also "invent", the 59 participants in the official section come from the entire African continent, but also from the diaspora: 14 from West Africa, 12 from the southern region, six from the Maghreb and six also from Central and East Africa, as well as an artist from Seychelles.

Finally, 19 artists from countries such as Cuba, France or the United States represent Afro-descendants.

His works will fill the dilapidated rooms of the old Palace of Justice, a building whose dilapidated state and huge empty rooms is an added value to give free rein to the imagination.

From the

of the Ivorian Saint-Etienne Yeanzi to the sculptures made with cartridges and bullet casings by the Congolese Freddy Tsimba, passing through the rowdy portraits of the Beninese Elon-M Tossou or the poetry of the short films of the Mozambican Lara Sousa.

The panoply of possibilities is enormous, all of them within the framework of proposing ways to face the challenges that Africa faces today, exacerbated after covid-19.

“The narrative of the pandemic has raised multiple questions about respect for nature and the autonomy of African societies.

The crisis has been the context of social and artistic activism, both in terms of the need to give birth to a new world to resolve the imbalance, and the need to heal the psyche of a humanity that racism has not stopped ravaging, after the public murder of George Floyd”, say the organizers.

It is not that the coronavirus is the central theme of the Biennale, which was already decided for the 2020 edition and is now renewed, but rather that the pandemic has come to intensify these contradictions.

"The chosen theme invites us to reinvent our models and the pandemic has made this approach imperative and the need to think about it urgent."

Beyond the official section, the Dakar Biennale is all about street art and private galleries.

For a month it will be difficult to escape the temptation of attending openings and visiting the hundreds of installations and proposals that appear throughout the city.

While the gardens of the residence of France have been populated with the arboreal exhibition of the Mauritanian Oumar Ball and the Senegalese Aliou Diack, the Artedakar gallery will show on its walls the colorful portraits of the Kenyan Evans Mbugua.

But Dak'Art 2022 is not resigned to staying in the capital and the artistic manifestations will also have their space in the regions of Senegal, from southern Ziguinchor to ancient Saint Louis.

Spain also contributes its grain of sand to the

of the Biennial.

Among other initiatives, Cultura Dakar, the cultural section of the Embassy proposes three visual projects in which Spanish and Senegalese artists participate.

The first project will take place in the new headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Dakar and aims to showcase the talent of seven Spanish photographers of African origin, Agnes Essonti, Sol Bela Mele, Rubén H. Bermúdez, Megane Mercury, Sergio Aparicio Okobé, Heidi Ramírez and Dilayla Romeo.

The exhibition is curated by Ángela Rodríguez Perea, and includes texts by the independent curator Yadira de Armas Rodríguez and the journalist Lucía Mbomío.

Also at the Cervantes Institute, the well-known Spanish urban art collective Boa Mistura will do a mural painting in the center itself, while the latest initiative will be

, promoted by the Ankaria foundation.

It consists of a group exhibition at the Boribana Museum in Dakar and the Siki gallery in Saint Louis, with works by Spaniards Avelino Sala, Paula Anta, Julio García Falagán, Arturo Comas, Chus García Fraile, Dea Gómez and Diego Omil.

Among the Africans, Abdoulaye Armine Kane, Fally Sene Sow, Caroline Gueye, Ibrahim Niang –known as Piniang–, Khadidiatou Sembène, Henri Jean Rodolphe Sagna and Khadim Gueye.