Sometimes I accidentally buy art. It never happens in the galleries of America or Europe, but when in West Africa, in the affordable lands of CFAs, cedis or Guinean francs, I turn into a collectionneuse. It’s there where paintings and sculptures have a way of hypnotising me into taking them home, spending money I don’t really have.

Last May I took my gallery-hopping ways to Dakar, joining hundreds of artists from across the continent and dozens of international critics, gallery owners and art collectors for Senegal’s eighth contemporary art biennial. During Dak’Art, as it is known, the city is festooned with exhibitions, both prominent and obscure, making the dusty, feisty, creative, incorrigibly street-smart city bloom like a desert flower.

The official biennial shows, known as the ‘In’ exhibitions, included the work of 48 painters, sculptors, photographers, designers and video and installation artists – all in the vanguard of contemporary African art. These showcases were spread out across three sites in the peninsular city centre.

But the event has also become a kind of armature around which a whole contemporary-art scene has been built. Surrounding the ‘In’ exhibitions, extending out like tentacles into the rest of the city and beyond, were 140 unofficial shows that had gathered under the rubric of the ‘Off’. Thanks to these displays, first started by artists in 2000 as a response to the biennial, there are few places you can go to in Dakar during this time without stumbling on an exhibition. These can range from professionally-curated gallery shows of Senegalese masters, to much less formal exhibitions: hodgepodge presentations in school courtyards, debut shows from recent graduates of the École des Beaux Arts, and displays of expat artists’ work in hair salons.

“A painter may have a friend with a shop, so he is able to put up an exhibit there and make it part of the ‘Off’,” said Susan Kart, a professor of African art at Sarah Lawrence College in the United States.

The island of Gorée, just offshore from Dakar, has also become part of the contemporary art scene, and its annual ‘Regards sur Cours’ event takes place during the biennial. Hosted each year since 2003, it involves the island’s old colonial buildings being filled with art and opened to the public. “It’s purely average art,” Kart explained, “in purely exquisite settings.” Regards sur Cours does feature a couple of blue-chip artists every year, but it must be said that not all of Dakar’s newfound creative activity is worth following. Nevertheless, there is a palpable sense that Dakar’s art scene is different to those in Paris or London – it’s alive, jumbled, unpredictable, and it has its own personality.

The most recent Dak’Art was not overtly political, but several works made piercing, poignant critiques of our affinity for consumerism and violence. Senegalese Samba Fall’s five-minute video Consomania and South African Grace Ndiritu’s Civilisations were both haunting commentaries on the evils of modern society. In the dreamlike Consomania, while dark, trippy music played in the background, blood dripped through bar codes as a skeleton was drowning in a sea of blood containing bottles, each labelled with one of society’s ills. Ndritu posed herself as a corpse on the street – dirtied, bloodied, clothes torn – in a staging that looked disturbingly like a post-conflict street scene in a newspaper photo.

In other mediums, Beninese Pélagie Gbaguidi’s Who? was yet another exquisite example of her signature drawing style, which is innocent and dark, delicate and aggressive. Tunisian photographer Mourad Gharrach, meanwhile, exhibited the black-and-white photo tryptich Vierge du désert (Desert Virgin). In it, a woman’s face becomes a shadow when wrapped up, veil-like, in white cotton, her ghostlike presence evoking sexuality, isolation, and death (Muslims traditionally bury the dead in several metres of plain cotton). Senegalese animation artist and painter Ibrahima Niang, known as Piniang, showed a mixed-media diptych called Actualité en Brève (News in Brief) that laid out the horrors of daily news in a film-frame format. Drawn in primary colours in cartoon-like fashion, masked armed men, pollution-spouting smokestacks, and the flailing arms of people who seemed to be drowning (likely a reference to the many recent deaths of Senegalese attempting to emigrate in flimsy pirogues) seemed to make our greatest tragedies into entertainment. Malian Mohamed Konaté’s three-minute video, Attraction, consisting of balls and marbles rolling around each other on a wooden table, their intricate dance calling to mind the complex, unpredictable pushes and pulls of human interaction, was also memorable.

However, not all of the work at the most recent biennial was up to snuff. Senegalese artist Soly Cissé and Ivoirian Jems Robert Koko Bi, two of the region’s most renowned artists, tried their hand at new mediums, but the works felt underdeveloped. South African Johann Van Der Schijff’s work was also simplistic and out of keeping with the show’s edgy spirit.

Overall, the show was a success – the work was original, risky, and often beautiful. However, as always, some complaints and rumours circled: it could have been more organised; the selection process for artists was confusing; and several good emerging artists were left out, while some of the same old artists were left in. But perhaps it’s a testament to its success that this biennial is always controversial. Despite complications, the exhibition has, with only one exception (in 1994), been mounted every other year since 1992. Cameroon and South Africa have erratically held biennials, but Dakar’s is the only regularly held international exhibition of African contemporary art in the world. The Senegalese government’s unflagging support for the event is something of a political and financial miracle, and Dak’Art has become an institution.

It also serves as a feeder market, a means for the international art world to view African artists’ work, and for artists to get the exposure that their home countries’ nascent art communities can’t provide.

It’s become “the place to show experimental art,” said Piniang, the youngest contributor to the 2002 biennial. “For emerging artists, it really opens doors.” As a result of showing in three biennials, he’s made contact with European gallery owners and museum curators, which resulted in several exhibitions abroad. And many of the selections from the 2004 biennial became part of the Africa Remix exhibition, which originated in Düsseldorf and travelled to London, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo and Johannesburg. It was Europe’s largest-ever show of African contemporary art.

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The enthusiasm around Dak’Art and the growing influx of visitors who come to see it each year have led to its increasing popularity among locals. “People in Dakar are starting to see that there’s something here,” said Piniang. “More and more of them are coming to the show.” And that’s turned people on to art, in general.

“There is an effervescence in Dakar around art now,” said the prolific painter Ibrahima Kébé. “It’s not just about beauty – art is also a kind of meditation, and people are beginning to understand that.” He paused, seeming to change his tune. “Art has become big business now.”

Indeed, the two go hand in hand: galleries and high-end shops are beginning to see the commercial potential of hosting exhibitions as increasing numbers of Senegalese see value in owning art. “Most buyers are Westerners,” said Kiné Aw, one of Dakar’s few well-known women artists. “But that’s starting to change with the nouveau riche.”

Every artist I spoke to, in fact, said that making a living from art was possible in Dakar, not a small thing in this underemployed city. Painters Mahmoud Bâba Ly, Tita Mbaye, Kiné Aw, and Ibrahima Kébé, along with many other artists who have studios at the state-sponsored Village des Arts, paint full-time. Senegalese artists, unlike their counterparts in other West African countries, don’t need to go abroad for exposure or sales. “So many of Senegal’s best artists work here,” said Kart, “but many of the best artists from Nigeria or Côte d’Ivoire are based in New York or London. The Senegalese may go away, but then they come back.”

As a result, respect for art in Senegalese society is growing, opening up possibilities for young artists. “Artists have always been looked down on here,” Piniang told me at Galerie ATC, which was hosting an exhibition of his work. “The public used to think it’s for people who are lazy, who don’t go to school. Parents would never support a child who wanted to be an artist. But now people see artists making money, travelling abroad. And views are changing.”

As I walked along Allée des Baobabs, a colonial-era stone walkway lined with majestic baobab trees on Gorée, there was a more familiar style of art on show. Propped up along its length was painting after painting, each stereotypically African: gestural stick figures in bright colours of tangerine orange, royal blue and bubble-gum pink; free-form expressionistic paint dribbles; and iconic decorative elements like cowrie shells. It’s souvenir art, sold on every tourist allée in Senegal.

But these paintings also tell another story: they evolved from the École de Dakar, a school of art created and promoted by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Artists from the École were the new country’s cultural representatives, its marketing department. They painted and wove images of Senegal’s African nature – creative, intuitive, organic – to announce its newly independent, non-European identity to the outside world. Senghor wanted Senegal to embody négritude, the philosophy of an exalted, romanticised Blackness that he created with fellow expatriate intellectuals in Paris. He wrote about négritude in his poetry and in a series of essays entitled Liberté (Freedom), and these became part of Senegal’s cultural exports.

Négritude was ultimately dismissed as racist and primitivistic. But in pursuing it, Senghor established culture as a touchstone of Senegalese society and created the foundations for contemporary art. “Senghor generated a debate about culture,” said Susan Kart. “He steered the political debate into a cultural outlet.” In creating an image of the country that was palatable to France, she explained, Senghor used the École de Dakar to strike a delicate balance, allowing the country to start anew while retaining French support. The story of Senegal’s political independence is, in fact, closely tied to its artistic development.

At the same time, much of the work from the École de Dakar was derivative, clichéd, and amateurish, in large part because two of its three leaders disparaged technical training on the grounds that it was too European and blocked the African artist’s naturally creative spirit. “The École de Dakar set up huge obstacles for us,” said Piniang. “The style has become so deeply ingrained in the Senegalese visual vocabulary,” he explained, “that it has become a crutch.”

“There is a split between the two generations,” said Piniang. “After doing what Senghor wanted for so long, [the École de Dakar artists] got blocked. Now, we don’t need to ‘depict Africa’ anymore.”

But the question of African identity seems to remain for many Senegalese artists working in an international contemporary art world that is so dominated by American and European players. Amadou Dieng echoed several artists I spoke to: “I don’t believe in American art, French art or Senegalese art,” he said. “Art goes beyond ethnicity, beyond nationality. It’s between the hearts of two people.”

At the same time, some artists seem to be searching for a medium that can reach African audiences specifically. In the 1980s, Moustapha Dimé and a number of other artists supplanted the École de Dakar’s preferred European formats – painting and tapestry – with sculpture, thought to be closer to local tradition. Today, Piniang thinks that it’s now video and animation’s turn. “We Senegalese always live in groups. We do things in groups,” he said. “That’s one reason television is so popular here – it’s something you can do with others. Video responds more to our reality.”

President Abdoulaye Wade, meanwhile, seems to be following in Senghor’s footsteps, promoting Dak’Art and organising a new edition of Senghor’s 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (World Festival of Black Arts). Support for the biennial seems to be a similar effort to portray Senegal as a capital of African culture. “There’s a certain amount of prestige attached to art,” said Kart. “It makes the country look politically stable, which helps to garner support and bring in development financing.” Whatever the incentives, artists – and Senegalese contemporary art – are benefiting.

And so did I. Ultimately, I couldn’t make it through my research without dipping into my bank account. The painting I bought depicts a woman standing and looking straight ahead with a bird on her shoulder. The bird holds what appears to be an olive branch in its mouth, while behind them, two people offer her another branch. The painting will always remind me of Dakar, but the effect it has on me transcends place. The title is Liberté. 

Where to look at art in Dakar
• Galerie Le Manège
3, Rue Parchappe
(near French Embassy)
+221 33 823 03 20

• Galerie Atiss
Avenue Hassan II (formerly Av. Albert Sarraut)
+221 76 596 93 28

• Village des Arts
Route de l’Aéroport
(next to Stade de l’Amitié)
+221 77 643 20 71

• Galerie National
19, Avenue Hassan II (near Marché Kermel)
+221 33 821 25 11

• AGF Assurances
Avenue Hassan II
+221 33 849 44 00

• Galerie Arte
5, rue Victor Hugo
Espace Vema
Embarcadère Gorée
+221 77 634 59 80

• Galerie ATC
(formerly Arte Fact)
Rue Birago Diop, Point E (behind Station Total)
+221 33 824 44 83

• Musée Théodore Monod (Musée IFAN)
Place Soweto (near the Assemblée Nationale)
+221 33 824 16 52