Dakartnews

14/05/2026

A new foundation based in Basel, Switzerland, has been created to continue the legacy of the late curator and cultural thinker Koyo Kouoh, one of the most influential figures in contemporary African art.

The Koyo Kouoh Foundation aims to structure and extend the work she initiated throughout her career by supporting contemporary African cultural production globally. Based in Basel, where Kouoh lived and worked, the foundation will operate internationally through funding, resources, research, and institutional support for artists, curators, and cultural practitioners engaged in contemporary African cultural production worldwide.

According to its mission, the foundation seeks to continue a living tradition rather than preserve it as a static legacy. It is grounded in the belief that art is shaped by history, power, access, and the material conditions in which artists and curators work.

The governance of the foundation brings together a constellation of international profiles drawn from contemporary art, cultural institutions, and the economic sphere. Curators, artists, cultural strategists, and figures engaged in supporting the arts form a board conceived as a transcontinental network of perspectives and expertise.

The foundation also continues the intellectual and institutional structures Kouoh helped build, including Raw Material Company in Dakar, the influential art center she founded in 2008.

Its program focuses on supporting research, education, production, and circulation, with particular attention to practices connected to Africa, its diasporas, and Afro-Caribbean contexts. The foundation argues that these spaces are central to contemporary global culture and critical thought.

It also calls for cultural institutions to become more open, responsible, and connected to social realities, insisting that culture is not secondary but structural.

For the foundation, artists and curators do not simply produce culture; they also create knowledge, relationships, and new possibilities for the future.

09/05/2026

Inside Morocco’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, monumental woven forms welcome visitors into an immersive space where craftsmanship becomes architecture, memory, and sound.

Asǝṭṭa by Amina Agueznay, curated by Meriem Berrada, is not only an exhibition to observe — it is one to listen to, to move through, and to experience collectively. Rooted in Moroccan artisanal traditions and created in collaboration with artisans from across the Kingdom, the pavilion transforms ancestral gestures into a contemporary language.

At the Arsenale, threads, textures, and voices intertwine to create a living atmosphere suspended between materiality and spirituality.

07/05/2026

At the 61st Venice Biennale, the Zimbabwe Pavilion offers a deeply contemporary reflection on the mechanisms of human adaptation in times of crisis. Titled SECOND NATURE | MANYONGA, the exhibition brings together artists Eva Raath, Felix Shumba, Franklin Dzingai, Gideon Gomo, and Pardon Mapondera in a multidisciplinary exploration of resilience, trauma memory, and survival strategies. This year also marks Zimbabwe’s eighth participation in the Venice Biennale.

As part of series, DakArtNews visited the pavilion and met its curator, Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, who reflected on the origins of the project:

“I started thinking about rewiring, recalibrating. When you have a traumatic event for instance, it rewires how you react to things, how you make decisions. So second nature is a bit about that. Some of the decisions we make when we encounter a particular problem and crises change the way we see the world.”

For the curator, SECOND NATURE is not limited to a psychological reflection. The project also draws on an organic and vegetal metaphor: that of the rhizome. She notably refers to ginger, which is capable of growing back even when part of its structure has been cut.

“Even our decisions are kind of rhizomatic like how ginger grows. It always finds a new way to survive when you cut a part of it. So second nature is about that. It’s also about resilience. Mayonga is a Shona word that speaks to the same thing.”

Through installations, sculptures, paintings…the five artists aim at giving forms to this reflection.

06/05/2026

As the Venice Biennale opened its doors on May 5, we turn our attention to a selection of works by artists from Africa and diaspora whose visual language left a lasting impression.

06/05/2026

The Democratic Republic of the Congo marks its debut at the 61st Venice Biennale with the exhibition “Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu!”, where fire is used as a metaphor for energy, destruction, transformation, resistance, and renewal.

“One of the main purposes of this exhibition was to come from reality. Most of the time, the image of the Congo is linked with violence, extraction, war, minerals, and also conflict. A country you could say is burning. One of our profound desires was to be able to show that there are also other forces, an ongoing force of creation. We did not want to have an exhibition about necropolitical arguments, but we wanted to focus on the fire that doesn’t burn, the fire that also nurtures,” curator Nadia Yala Kisukidi told DakArtNews.

Featured artists include: Sammy Baloji, Arlette Bashizi, Patrick Bongoy, Damso, Gosette Lubondo, Nelson Makengo, Aimé Mpané, Léonard Pongo, and Géraldine Tobé.

06/05/2026

Visiting Amoako Boafo’s exhibition feels like reconnecting with a part of ourselves that the social gaze has taught us to restrain.

Yet beyond this intimate dimension, his work also reclaims visibility and presence, challenging how Black bodies have historically been seen—and who gets to be fully looked at.

Set within the historic rooms of Palazzo Grimani in Venice, his contemporary figures subtly shift the codes of representation, asserting presences that are both grounded and elusive.

Opening today alongside the Venice Biennale, It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense is on view until November 22, 2026.

06/05/2026

DakArtNews today the opening of the Senegalese Pavilion guided by Caroline Gueye.

At Palazzo Navagero, the artist led us through WURUS, an installation that is not simply viewed — it is experienced, navigated, and questioned.

Here, gold is not a material to admire, but a point of departure. A way to examine what we perceive as valuable, evident, and real. As you move through the space, perception begins to shift, and one idea becomes clear: value is never fixed — it is constructed.

05/05/2026

Birame Ndiaye (b. 1968) is a Senegalese visual artist from Pikine, a working-class suburb of Dakar where he grew up. For over thirty years, he has developed a body of work rooted in urban reality, which he describes as Urban Jungle — the city as a dense, vital environment shaped by survival, improvisation and social tension.

A graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar (1998), Ndiaye draws on the legacy of the Set Setal movement while shifting its energy toward an exploration of the city’s contemporary transformations. His work engages directly with urban matter: he paints on canvas as well as on recovered posters, treating them as extensions of the wall itself. His compositions, often saturated, oscillate between figuration and abstraction, forming fragmented spaces where structures emerge and dissolve.

At the center of his work are anonymous silhouettes — faceless, ageless figures that drift through the surface of the painting. Sometimes absorbed into the material, sometimes sharply visible, they embody the inhabitants of this urban jungle, caught in a quiet struggle for visibility and survival.

Rooted in Pikine, his practice maintains a rare coherence between lived experience and artistic language. His work can be read as both a portrait of contemporary Dakar and a broader reflection on the human condition in today’s cities.

It is in his studio in Pikine, surrounded by the very environment that feeds his work, that we met the artist.

04/05/2026

Birame Ndiaye (b.1968), a Senegalese visual artist from Pikine, a working-class suburb of Dakar where he grew up, has been developing for over thirty years a body of work deeply rooted in urban reality, which he calls Urban Jungle — the city as jungle: a dense, ruthless and vital environment governed by the laws of survival, improvisation and social predation.

A graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar in 1998, Ndiaye draws on the legacy of the Set Setal movement (1988–1990), extending its spirit while shifting it toward an analysis of the contemporary transformations of the city.
His painting draws directly from urban matter: he works as much on canvas as on recovered posters, which he treats as fully-fledged pictorial supports, equivalent to the wall itself. His often saturated compositions oscillate between figuration and abstraction, generating fragmented spaces in which unstable architectures coexist with surfaces on the verge of dissolution. This variability reflects a practice in constant tension, where the image is alternately built up and dissolved.

At the heart of this universe are his anonymous silhouettes: human figures stripped of faces, age and individual identity, crossing the canvases like unstable and vulnerable presences. Sometimes absorbed into the pictorial matter, sometimes standing out with an almost luminous clarity, they embody the inhabitants of this urban jungle — beings engaged in a silent struggle for visibility and survival.

These figures speak to a profound transformation of Senegal’s urban fabric. Pikine, where Ndiaye comes from, is the product of a policy of decongesting Dakar initiated in the early 1950s, which accelerated with rapid demographic growth and urbanization. From the 2000s onwards, the country’s shift toward economic liberalization further intensified these dynamics: infrastructure expansion, increased peripheralization of modest populations, and deepening spatial segregation. In this new urban jungle, anonymity becomes a form of camouflage, social interactions loosen, and a sense of detachment and generalized competition takes hold.

Birame Ndiaye’s work functions as a sensitive archive of this period. Through his evanescent figures, he makes visible the process of human invisibilization, as if rapid urbanization were accompanied by a dilution of human presence and a loss of collective soul. Without being overtly demonstrative, his gaze offers a lucid critique of the social fractures and logics of domination that structure this urban environment. The atmosphere emanating from the work is dense and often oppressive, traversed by a muted tension.
The gesturality itself sometimes carries the mark of contained violence, sometimes of resigned withdrawal.

Deeply rooted in Pikine, Birame Ndiaye maintains a rare coherence between his living environment, his daily experience and his artistic language. His work can be read both as a chronicle of contemporary Dakar and as a broader meditation on the human condition in today’s cities: a space of survival where erasure threatens, yet where a form of silent resistance stubbornly persists. It is in his studio in Pikine, surrounded by the very environment that feeds his work, that we met the artist.

Birame Ndiaye (b.1968), a Senegalese visual artist from Pikine, a working-class suburb of Dakar where he grew up, has been developing for over thirty years a body of work deeply rooted in urban rea…

03/05/2026

As African artists gain increasing international recognition, critical discourse on the continent often remains dominated by promotional writing rather than rigorous analysis.

For Dr. Célestin Koffi Yao — Ivorian critic, artist, gallerist, author, and scholar — this imbalance reveals a deeper structural problem. Bridging artistic practice and theoretical reflection, he advocates for a more demanding form of criticism, one grounded in careful judgment rather than praise.

To critique, he insists, is to put art on trial. In this conversation with DakArtNews, Dr. Koffi Yao reflects on the crisis of art criticism in Africa, denounces the culture of complacency, and explains why genuine judgment — even when uncomfortable — is essential for the development of a truly vibrant artistic scene.

Link in bio.