Art Routes: Negotiating Dak'art

Abstract

can only recount the experience of Dak'Art through anecdotal impres sions. It is impossible to filter the powerful impact of the city of Dakar, the bumbling bureaucracy of Bien nale organizers, and the technical in competence of its installation, from a critical reading and analysis of the event. I do not consider this a negative experience per se, nor level it as crit icism. Sometimes things are what they are. Dak'Art, and the negotiation of its programs, is not a neutral affair and it does not function in a controlled environment. Everyday life in this contemporary urban city intrudes to provide a visceral, fragmented, and complex viewing experience, making a rewarding discovery of contemporary African art pro duction today. The disorganization of the Dak'Art Bien nale is legendary and, as far as I can ascer tain, not a single event in its history ever opened with all the works arrived and in stalled by the opening day. This year was no exception, and at the official opening on May 5, 2006, at the IFAN Musee d'art Africain, open crates were scattered everywhere, build ing and painting were frantically carrying on, and a number of artists' works were lying on the floor. This includes the installa tions of luminaries Frederic Bruly Bouabre and Abdoulaye Konate. I know of three art ists, Andrew Tshabangu, Robin Rhode, and Kudzanai Chiurai, whose work either had not arrived or was not installed when I left Dakar on May 10. Regardless of these distractions, many works at both WFAN and the Galerie National d'Art stood up to scrutiny. Works by Kori Newkirk (Diaspora/US) and Mounir Fatmi (Morocco) provided interesting if convergent perspectives. Newkirk's video projection Bixel is an almost irreverent choreography of a twirling and bobbing body, dressed in silver lame briefs and oozing glitter, born of a US-specific politics of race and sexuality. Fatmi's installation Getting out of History, in contrast, provided a searching outsider's documentary probe into the history of the Black Panther movement in the US. While it might be unfair to play these works against each other, the contextual collision cannot be ignored. At the same venue visitors were greet ed by a single-screen projection titled God Is Design by Adel Abdessemed (Algeria), an animation consisting of merging and morph ing graphic symbols, lines and shapes in a steady rhythm. While maintaining an or dered sequence, the work simultaneously questions this order, threatening to come apart at any moment. Another work down the hallway with a similarly critical view of religious iconography was Premonition of War (Scapegoat) by Wim Botha (South Africa). A compelling installation of seven large canvases (part of a monumental series) by Pelagie Gbaguidi (Rep. of Bn Members of this small and marginalized immigrant com munity provided personal mappings and an ecdotal descriptions of home, which Hobbs and Neustetter accessed to negotiate the city when they arrived, following and document ing idiosyncratic routes. These extraordinary documents and experiences were formed into a video installation and wall drawings. The project completes on its return to Jo hannesburg, where a presentation will be made to the Senegalese community to bring messages from home. It is a project that speaks eloquently about dislocation, but also about rich social engagements within for eign spaces. Another highlight in the Off was GawLab, a Dakar-based collective of cultur al agents and artists who presented a new media showcase at a popular restaurant and bar, Pen'Art Jazz Club. A collaboration be tween artists and software developers, the collective presented proposals new ways to explore the Internet as a tool art work, as well as ingenious ways of presenting such work publicly. Working from an Afri can vantage point, this groundbreaking initiative provides new platforms explo ration and experimentation. Attending the conference accompanying the main program, which was mostly con ducted in French, I had the nagging sense of receiving a watered-down version of things, with bad, fuzzy translations provid ed by the particularly poor language ser vices. However, that being said, seminal issues of contemporary art in Africa were much more rigorously discussed and debat ed than one would find in Southern Africa. I left with the distinct feeling of witnessing an extraordinary creative collision of critical minds and processes. And while difficulties with technical and bureaucratic delivery and the singular lingua franca might have brought an ironic twist to the theme of the exhibition, Africa: Agreements, Allusions and Misunderstandings, it is certain that Yacouba Konate, the chief curator, had achieved a complex and powerful realiza tion in the 7th Dak'Art Biennale of Contem porary African Art. K