A Sited Approach to the Contemporary Arts Scene in Dakar

Joanna Grabski's new book, Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar, takes what the author calls a sited approach to Dakar's art scene. This framework for viewing Dakar's place within a larger, global art scene places the actors of the city's creative economy at the center of analysis, rather than referring to European or American notions of how a global and cosmopolitan art city should look. From this vantage point, we discover that, as a thriving pan-African hub of contemporary art, Dakar is indeed an "art world city," a reference point for the continent, but also for global conversations on experimental artistic practices as they move across political, cultural, and linguistic borders. In shifting the analysis to this broader scope, Grabski focuses less on how art in Dakar engages with discourse on Africa or contemporary African creation and focuses more on the association between these artistic practices and conversations about global contemporary art.

As Grabski reminds us throughout her book, criticism of the Dakar art scene and its most salient features often hovers around that which the city appears to lack, in comparison with other major European or American art hubs. For example, one may be surprised to find a small number of permanent art galleries throughout the city—and, for a global art city, Dakar has few artists working with new media, compared to those focusing on painting, sculpture, and mixed materials. The city's flagship cultural event, Dak'Art, Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain, inaugurated in 1990 to showcase African literature and visual arts, has developed into a major event in the visual arts, one that has espoused a pan-African mission in bringing African artists to the center of global conversations around the contemporary art scene. It is often criticized for its chaos and the seemingly endless list of off sites, ensconced in makeshift spaces, that require viewers to navigate the city's congestion and unmarked streets; however, as Grabski argues, these challenges are part of the event, a rite of passage for any attendee seeking access to an art scene inseparable from the obstacles and frustrations out of which it emerged. The urban experience of Dakar must therefore be interwoven, as it is, into the event, since it is at the heart of the work of artists who seek not only to create engaging pieces, but also to propose a dialogue with their viewers about the nature and dynamics of city life. Grabski likewise traces the emergence in Dakar of the idea that the artist should be a chercheur (researcher), whose work engages with questions of urbanism as much as it explores aesthetics and artistic material. In fact, artists' choice of material forms a central part of the dialogue, as Dakar artists frequently opt to work through la récup, the recovery of discarded objects found amid the rubble of the urban landscape. Grabski argues convincingly that while this common practice may indeed constitute a response to a lack of means, it represents an artistic choice on the part of creators whose work reanimates the same landscape. Furthermore, this gesture carries a certain political punch, as Grabski states, allowing artists to resuscitate objects to realign them with an altered or reversed social order.

An additional distinction of the Dakar scene, and one that Grabski notes extensively, is the apparently reduced role of arts curation. Here, artists often take it upon themselves to contextualize and narrate their work for visitors, scholars, or collectors in their own studios. In fact, artists actively participate in creating value for their work by cultivating interpersonal relationships during studio visits. One possible interpretation of this practice would be to see it as a mere cutting-out of the middleman in the search for exposure and profit; however, Grabski focuses on the deeper enmeshment of artists in the processes of framing and reception that generate value for their work. For example, in the chapter on Joe Ouakam, Grabski explores the way in which Ouakam's persona interacts with his work and vice versa, making the...