africanah.org

Rosalie van Deursen writes a personal report of the biennial in Senegal.

Jean-Philippe Aka takes the same event as a starting point to talk about the market for contemporary African art. Van Deursen concludes: “Considering Dak’Art as the most important international platform for established and emerging African arts and artists based on the continent but also in the African Diaspora, the international well-attended 11^th edition seem to have succeeded”. Aka is convinced that many changes are necessary to make the African art market healthy.

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Although he hesitates to talk about it, the transition from Surinam to the Netherlands is an issue. It is a transition from a religious culture to a more secular culture. The move from a traditional art academy to an ‘everything-is-possible-academy’ must be enormous. These transitions challenge everyone’s identity.

Rob Perrée on the work of Ruben Cabenda.

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I always have human faces in my painting. People are what the world is made of. Personal memories (of course, nostalgia) are a very important aspect of my work. I always tell people that the best education I ever had was growing up in my grandfather’s compound.  Every evening as kids we would gather around and listen to stories; someone always had a story to tell. And during festivals performers would come to tell stories.

Yvette Greslé interviews Victor Ehikhamenor.

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Sanford Biggers’ works integrate film/video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music and performance.  He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols.  Through a multi-disciplinary formal process, and an equally syncretic creative approach, he makes works or ‘vignettes’ that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual. I got to know Biggers through a sort of patchwork of conversations as I interacted with him and his work over the years.

Writes Sasha Dees.

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The work of younger generations of artists such as Aboudia and Boua opens up interesting questions for art history, curating and criticism: focused on the idea of the contemporary and the African continent. I am concerned, not in refracting the work of these artists through a western art historical, curatorial and critical canon (broadly speaking). Rather I am interested in the practice of paying attention to the artist’s particular relationship to medium, process and place, and the conditions from which the work emerges (historical, social, economic, and political).

Yvette Greslé compares the work of two young African artists.

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