Encouraged by Senegal’s new president, teenagers and young adults, with social media tools in hand, have thronged an art exhibition that is usually the exclusive realm of the wealthy and elite.
Every two years, the Dakar Biennale draws in wealthy collectors and stylish art aficionados, who show up at exhibitions in Senegal’s capital with sunglasses they’re too cool to take off.
But this year, a new kind of art lover is making what is already Africa’s hottest art show trendier still.
Increasingly, it’s Senegalese teenagers and young adults who are thronging Dakar’s Old Courthouse, the biennale’s main exhibition center.
They show up with dates or with friends after classes.
In flip-flops or shiny leather shoes.
In a neatly ironed linen shirt or a faded soccer jersey.
Wearing a flashy head scarf or tight leather pants.
For many of them, this year’s biennale represents their first contact with contemporary art, or at least the kind aimed at global connoisseurs.
“It’s fun, it’s free, it’s beautiful and it’s so Instagrammable,” said Sokna Mbene Thiam, a 17-year-old high school student who came on a recent afternoon with two classmates.
As Ms. Thiam and her friends scrolled through hundreds of pictures and videos they had taken on her smartphone, she said that they had all heard about the biennale from the same medium: videos on social media.
“There are a few more artworks we want to pose in front of,” she said, before rushing off.
Nearly three-quarters of Senegal’s 17 million people are under 35. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Africa’s youngest-elected leader and a popular figure among West African youth, has urged them to visit the government-funded Biennale.
“Art distracts, makes us dream and think; it teaches and educates,” he said during the opening ceremony.
Hundreds of young people heed Mr. Faye’s calls everyday, arriving with selfie sticks, smartphone stabilizers and portable lights.
“Art speaks to us,” said Ndongo Ndiaye, a 22-year-old refrigeration technician. Nodding next to him was his friend Serigne Saliou Diouf, a law student, who had photographed him in front of dozens of artworks.
Thousands of artists from Africa and its diaspora are exhibiting their creations in hundreds of venues across Dakar for this year’s biennale, which was postponed by six months because of budgetary constraints and political tensions. But after peaceful elections hailed across the continent as a testament to the country’s democratic stability, Senegal’s largest city has once again morphed into a gigantic open-air canvas.
And it is the Old Courthouse, built at the end of the French colonial era in the late 1950s and closed in 1992 because of fears that it would collapse, that attracts visitors in the tens of thousands.
The biennale’s home base was for decades the primary courthouse of a newly independent Senegal. It is scheduled to be transformed into a permanent Palace of the Arts by 2027, epitomizing the constant renewal of a city that has long freed itself from Western architectural traditions and is now angling for a new identity as the cultural heart of West Africa.
The artwork in the biennale’s 15th edition tackles some of the biggest questions facing African societies — prime among them, the need to transform livelihoods in the face of climate change and to address the high unemployment that drives many to migrate.
Salimata Diop, the 37-year-old French-Senegalese curator, said the 2024 biennale was as much about reclaiming African heritage as exploring the futures that the continent holds.
“The Old Courthouse was built to represent the crushing justice of the French colonial empire,” said Ms. Diop, an art critic and classical music composer who grew up in Senegal and studied in Europe. “We want everyone to feel legitimate to step in and inhabit this place.”
The young visitors definitely have made the space their own.
They pose for selfies in front of a stunning, 22-feet-high abstract painting by the Malian artist Abdou Ouologuem.
They improvise catwalks in the Old Courthouse’s spacious lobby, once invaded by weeds and birds of prey when the building was abandoned.
Ms. Diop said she felt proud to see so many young visitors.
“Why do we take selfies? To make art one’s own,” she said as she roamed the rooms of the Old Courthouse. “It’s not just about aesthetics, some are very touched by the artworks.”
The legacy of colonization and the slave trade, as well as the extreme effects of climate change on African societies, are recurring topics at this year’s biennale as they have been at past iterations.
“Cotton Blues,” the installation by the French-Beninese artist Laeila Adjovi, celebrates cotton growers in Benin, the title echoing the blues of enslaved Africans as much as the growers’ distress in the face of climate change and global competition.
But this year’s edition at the Old Courthouse stands out for the intimacy that artists have created throughout 43,000 square feet of exhibition spaces. It is a welcome feat for an art event hosted on a continent whose rapidly growing cities are suffocating with rising levels of pollution, overcrowding and chaotic urban planning.
In the “Haptic Library,” an art installation by an art collective, Archive Ensemble, a former courtroom has been fashioned into an anticolonial library with mats and pillows, where young visitors sift through books while others study on their laptops.
In “Vines,” visitors took off their shoes to cross into the magical forest imagined by the Moroccan artist Ghizlane Sahli, whose knitted flowers and lianas have been an Instagram favorite.
And in a room converted into an Afro-futuristic bar by the Senegalese visual artist Mohamed Diop, visitors enact drinking and mingling scenes.
The biennale’s popularity has come with some hiccups.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, overwhelmed docents were running from one room to another asking visitors not to touch paintings, sit on installations or block entrances to take photos.
The Old Courthouse was once emblematic of all the buildings in Dakar’s downtown that are falling into disrepair. But it, like a few others, has been rehabilitated in the name of art.
It now is a comforting space, its green-and-white tiles looking like traditional woven cloth and its flowing curtains reminiscent of the sheets that hang in family courtyards across Dakar.
Arébénor Basséne, a Senegalese artist exhibiting at the Old Courthouse and at Selebe Yoon, a gallery nested in a former shopping center, said these buildings were privileged canvases upon which to write “the illustrious pages of Africa’s history,” even if some darker ones were drafted there as well.
It was in the Old Courthouse that a former prime minister accused of plotting against Senegal’s first president was sentenced to life in prison in 1963; and it was where Omar Blondin Diop, an anti-imperialist activist and artist, was sentenced in 1972 to three years in jail, where he died under murky circumstances.
“You feel the weight of history as you step in,” said Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, an artist who was born in Guadeloupe, grew up in Paris and now lives in Ivory Coast.
At the Old Courthouse, Mr. Deloumeaux covered the floor of two exhibition rooms with rush matting, creating a delicate cocoon for his paintings of male models wearing laces reminiscent of his grandmother’s.
The Senegalese artist Germaine Anta Gaye re-created a living room that felt so homey that visitors said it reminded them of their grandparents’ house.
In what was likely a recognition of the biennale’s appeal to Dakar’s young, a crucial voting bloc, Mr. Faye, the president, unexpectedly visited the Old Courthouse last month.
Ms. Diop, the curator, said that Mr. Faye’s presence at the biennale, and its success among the country’s youth, had reassured her about the future of Senegal’s art scene.
Still, she cautioned that nothing can be taken for granted — not the government’s funding for the biennale nor that the event can continue to call the Old Courthouse home.
“We must keep fighting,” she said, “to offer a voice from Africa that we don’t hear enough in the art world.”
Annika Hammerschlag contributed reporting.
Read the original article on The New York TImes.
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