The Artists & Designers

The 16th Dakar Biennale (Dak’Art) announced its artists as a web page. The organizer’s selection page, last modified on October 5, 2026 and read for this guide on October 6, lists 54 entries for the international exhibition. A second page lists 21 for the Design section. Together they are the 75 proposals named in the launch communiqué of September 24, chosen under artistic director Morad Montazami for an edition that runs from November 19 to December 19, 2026, with the title (anti)fragilité : arts de la réparation et stratégies du contrecoup.

What the list does not yet carry is biography. Every artist page was created on October 5 as a title and an image. By the evening of October 6 the organizer had added text to six of them (Georges Adéagbo, Victor Adewale, Fatiha Zemmouri, Nia Hampton, Dela Anyah, and Joey Aresoa), according to the organizer’s own post feed. The other 48 were empty, and the filling-in looked to be under way. The press page held a placeholder and no press kit.

So the table below separates two kinds of fact. The names, the spellings and the country labels are the organizer’s. A birth year or a practice is the organizer’s only where the row says “organizer”. Everywhere else it comes from one independent source, named and linked in the row: a gallery, a museum, a residency, a prize foundation. Those entries are not the Biennale’s statements, and where the single source is thin the row carries an Unconfirmed flag. A dash means nothing was found. Nothing here is guessed.

Two more things are missing from every page. None names a work or a project for Dakar, and none assigns an artist to a venue or to one of the five curatorial lines. APS reported that the Ancien Palais de Justice, the former courthouse at Cap Manuel, is the main site for both the international exhibition and the Design section; the organizer’s venue pages had not said so as of October 6, 2026. The handful of works announced in the press are on The Exhibitions page, and the buildings are on What to See.

Country labels are printed in the organizer’s French: Afrique du Sud is South Africa, Allemagne is Germany, États-Unis is the United States, Royaume-Uni is the United Kingdom, Norvège is Norway, Soudan is Sudan, Ouganda is Uganda, Île Maurice is Mauritius. The Profile links go to Biennale’s own artist records. The same list, kept up to date, is on My Biennale.

Two collectives, a duo, and one artist presented by another

The 54 entries are 51 individual artists, two collectives and one duo, by a count of the organizer’s list. The collectives are Neve Insular, labelled Cabo-Verde, and Studio Dialogues, labelled Ghana. The collective’s own crowdfunding page describes Neve Insular as an independent group on the island of São Vicente, founded by the artist and researcher Rita Rainho and the fashion designer Vanessa Monteiro, which has grown cotton since 2018 on about 800 square metres and runs workshops, residencies and collective harvests. Unconfirmed On Studio Dialogues this guide found nothing. The duo is Kelechi Agwuncha and Kesiena Wanogho, labelled Nigeria / États-Unis; a source was found for Agwuncha alone.

One entry is billed unlike any other: Pape Diop, présenté par (presented by) Mamadou Boye Diallo. The organizer does not explain the billing. A report in Lepetitjournal.com Dakar, published in May 2019 on an exhibition at the Institut français, describes a self-taught Pape Diop of the Médina district who drew with cigarette ends, coffee, charcoal and motor oil on scrap wood, cardboard and pieces of wall. It also describes a Mamadou Boye Diallo, of the Médina association Yataal Art, who had followed and filmed him for about four years and gathered the works he left behind. The pairing of the two names makes it very likely that these are the same men; the organizer has not said so. Unconfirmed At the launch Montazami said of Diop that he “crée dans la rue, expose ses oeuvres sur les trottoirs de Dakar, à la Médina” (in English: creates in the street, shows his works on the pavements of Dakar, in the Médina), as APS reported. Diptyk describes him as a self-taught painter of saints and popular figures on salvaged plywood.

Spellings, and the order of the list

This page prints each name as the organizer prints it, even where the artist is usually written otherwise. Souad Abderasoul is more often Souad Abdelrasoul, and Biennale’s own record is under that spelling. Ismail Bahri is usually Ismaïl. Mohamed Laouli appears elsewhere as Mohammed. Melinda Fourn-Houngbo is Mélinda Fourn at her Dakar gallery, Selebe Yoon. Ivy Brandie Chemutai Ng’ok exhibits as Chemu Ng’ok, the Goethe-Institut’s award page shows. On two artist pages the label for the Democratic Republic of Congo runs two words together; the table restores the space.

The organizer’s page is not alphabetical throughout. Zemmouri and Hampton sit in third and fourth place, Wezile Harmans is filed under M, Abderasoul under S, and Fourn-Houngbo under H. This page orders everyone by surname.

What the labels do and do not say

The country labels are the organizer’s, and they mix nationality, heritage and residence. Five entries are labelled France alone. Independent sources tie four of those artists to places a long way from Paris: Ernest Breleur was born and lives in Martinique, according to Maëlle Galerie; Clémence Lollia Hilaire was born in Guadeloupe, by the Coventry Biennial’s page; Tabita Rezaire lives and works in Cayenne, in French Guiana, Les Abattoirs in Toulouse says; and Stéphane Foucaud arrived in New Caledonia in 1974, by an Artsper profile. Unconfirmed That fits what Montazami told APS on September 30: he wants a diasporic dialogue that takes in island spaces, archipelagos and overseas territories. The call itself was open only to African artists and artists of the diaspora, under article 7 of the organizer’s rules.

Other labels sit oddly beside the one biography found. Hady Barry is labelled Guinée-Conakry/États-Unis; the Prince Claus Fund has her based in Côte d’Ivoire. Kevin Rouillard is labelled Cabo-Verde / France; his gallery’s text mentions only France, so the organizer’s label is the one source for the Cabo Verde link. Abderasoul is labelled Soudan/Égypte; the Dubai Collection calls her an Egyptian artist in Cairo and does not account for Sudan.

Open questions

• Georges Adéagbo’s birthplace. The organizer’s page gives 1942 and Benin City, in Nigeria. That is printed here as the organizer gives it. It has not been checked against the artist’s own site and should be before anyone repeats it.
• Jean David Nkot’s birth year. The University of Bayreuth’s page gives 1989 in one place and 1985 in another. Gallery and auction listings seen in search say 1989, which is the likelier year.
• Which Cheikh Ndiaye. The organizer’s page is a name and an image. The row follows Galerie Cécile Fakhoury’s biography of the painter born in Dakar in 1970, who works between Dakar and Prague, because that gallery is in Dakar. A Centre Pompidou record lists another Cheikh Ndiaye, born in Dakar in 1973 and based in New York and Dakar. The organizer has published nothing that tells them apart.
• Joey Aresoa. L’Express de Madagascar profiled a Joëlle Aresoa in January 2024 as an artist working in visual art and literature, including looped poetry and slam. The surname and the practice match the organizer’s text; the first name differs, so the row relies on the organizer alone.
• Nia Hampton and Baltimore. The organizer’s French text says she is from Baltimore; its English text says she is based there.
• No biography at all. For Kolawolé Atcho, Catherine Boyer, Bitibiza Muongo, Mona Okulla Obua, Collectif Studio Dialogues, and Kesiena Wanogho, no usable independent source was found by October 6, 2026, and the organizer’s pages were empty.

What the press has read into it

Diptyk, in the fullest reading of the list so far, calls the selection short and tight, with little room for beginners, and picks out three names from outside the international circuit: El Hadji Sy, of the second generation of the École de Dakar, Breleur, and Diop. It counts a Moroccan group of four (M’Barek Bouhchichi, Safaa Erruas, Zemmouri, and Laouli) and notes that South Africa and Nigeria are lightly represented while Suriname, Guinea, Cabo Verde, Madagascar and Mauritius appear. Montazami’s own account of his criteria, given to Le360, is balance of gender, media and geography, a mix of emerging and established artists, and attention to island and archipelago territories.

Several names have a history with Dakar. Dominique Zinkpè won the UEMOA Prize at Dak’Art in 2002, according to his gallery’s biography. Sy took part in documenta 14 in 2017, its artist page records. Two entries carry the label of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the guest country of honour: Beau Disundi Nzazi and Muongo. For the Senegalese artists in the wider life of the city, see Dakar Art Scene.

The Design section has a title, Les Unités d’Habitation Pan-Af, in English Pan-AF Dwelling Units, and a curator, Youssouf Fofana, the founder of Maison Château Rouge. The organizer’s design page calls it a manifesto exhibition. Its hypothesis is a set of Pan-African dwelling units in which each piece reflects on one way of inhabiting: sleeping, cooking, working, learning, transmitting, welcoming, producing, repairing, celebrating. The page cites two precedents, the salons of the Union des Artistes Modernes for the idea of an immersive show and the Zaria Art Society for a modernity built from inside the continent.

The page lists 21 entries: 17 individuals and four labelled Collectif. All 21 individual pages were a title and an image on October 6, 2026, with no biography and no work. Every practice in the table therefore comes from an independent source, and six entries have none. None of the 21 is yet in Biennale’s directory. For the section as an exhibition, see The Exhibitions.

Notes on the design list

• Collectives. The four entries labelled Collectif are Altin Studio, Couleurs Indigo, Dach & Zéphir, and Ndomo. Domaine de Boisbuchet describes Dach & Zéphir as a duo, Dimitri Zephir and Florian Dach, working together since 2016.
• Ndomo. A European Commission note of 2012 describes N’Domo as a training organization and bogolan workshop in Ségou, founded by Boubacar Doumbia, which teaches young people natural-dye techniques. It is very likely the organizer’s Collectif Ndomo; the organizer gives no text to confirm it. Unconfirmed
• Hilali Hiba. The organizer’s title gives the name in that order and does not say which word is the surname.
• Two Fofanas. Aboubakar Fofana, the indigo dyer in the list, is not Youssouf Fofana, the curator. No source states a relationship between them.
• Balla Niang’s birth year. The 50 Golborne page gives 1970 in its header and 1980 in its text. The table prints neither.
• Labels again. Dozie Kanu is labelled Nigéria; LUMA Arles has him born in Houston and working in Portugal. Omar Chakil is labelled Égypte; Design Doha has him born in Beirut and raised in Paris, the son of Egyptian-Lebanese parents.

Three entries carry Sénégal in the label: Aïssa Dione, Balla Niang, and Mauro Petroni, who is listed as Sénégal / Italie. Petroni has his own place in the Biennale’s story. In an interview with DakArtNews in October 2024, he said he sat on the orientation committee in 2000 and later ran communication for the OFF, the independent programme that surrounds the official one, as it grew from about thirty spaces to 450. Those figures are his own account. Unconfirmed The OFF has its own section on Dakar Art Scene.

Three artists stand outside the 75. The communiqué of September 24 names two of them, the Grand Témoin and the Carte blanche. The third, the tribute artist, was announced in a post of October 5. None of the three is in Biennale’s directory yet.

Grand Témoin: Faouzi Laatiris

The organizer’s post presents Faouzi Laatiris, of Morocco, as a major figure in contemporary art and in the teaching of art in his country, whose work explores raw materials, industrial memory and cultural hybridization, and who is invited as Grand Témoin, which the organizer’s English renders as Distinguished Witness. It gives no birth year, no work and no venue, and it does not say what a Grand Témoin does. An artist page from the 2012 Marrakech Biennale has him born in 1958, living in Martil, working in Tétouan, and teaching at the Institut National des Beaux-Arts there since 1992. Diptyk adds that he taught for more than thirty years in that school’s Volume et installation studio and that Montazami organized his 2016 retrospective at the Musée Mohammed VI. Montazami’s organizer biography lists Laatiris among the artists he has written about, and he described him to Le360 as “hors-système mais pourtant essentiel dans l’histoire de la pédagogie artistique au Maroc” (in English: outside the system and yet essential in the history of art teaching in Morocco). APS reports that he is 68 and showed at Dak’Art in 2002. Unconfirmed Erruas, in the international exhibition, was born in Tétouan and works there.

Carte blanche: Serigne Mbaye Camara

The organizer describes Serigne Mbaye Camara as a Senegalese artist and teacher and a pioneer of the visual arts in Senegal, whose work questions symbolic forms, material memory and the spiritual care of objects and spaces. A carte blanche is a free hand; what he will do with it, and where, has not been published. His Dakar gallery, Galerie Atiss, gives a birth in Saint-Louis in 1945 Unconfirmed, diplomas from the fine arts schools of Dakar in 1968 and Metz in 1972, and three decades as a professor at the École nationale des arts du Sénégal, with a practice built on experiment with materials and assemblage.

Tribute: Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob, known as “Ngoor”

The tribute is the one part of the selection with an address. The organizer’s post says that Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob, the painter and sculptor known as “Ngoor”, born in Dakar in 1973 and dead in 2017, will have a monographic exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the Galerie nationale, curated by Ndèye Rokhaya Guèye, under the title La Sagesse de l’Epreuve (roughly, the wisdom of the ordeal). It is the only venue and the only exhibition title on any of the 78 pages read for this list. The curator, a teacher of art, sits on the Biennale’s Comité d’orientation, as her committee post shows, and article 9 of the rules entrusts tribute exhibitions to Senegalese curators under the Secretary General’s supervision. Only one tribute has been announced. The organizer’s tributes page still carried a coming-soon line on October 6, 2026, and no independent account of the artist was found. More is on The Exhibitions page.

The Biennale’s Comité d’orientation named Morad Montazami artistic director on April 15, 2026, after an open international call. Under article 8 of the rules, the artists were chosen by an international selection committee made up of the artistic director, members of his curatorial team and members of the Comité d’orientation, with the Secretary General taking part. The organizer posted a biography of each curator on October 4, 2026. The cards below summarize those texts. None gives a birth year. The nationalities come from APS’s profile of September 30. The people behind the institution, from the Secretary General to the committee, are on the People page.

Where the team and the list touch

A reader comparing the two will notice a few overlaps. None is stated by the organizer, and the selection was a committee’s. The gallery biographies used above for Serigne Ibrahima Dieye and Cheikh Ndiaye are those of Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, which Lopez directs in Dakar, and Lopez’s own biography lists an essay in Bolol, the 2024 publication by Eva Diallo. Sy serves on a Prince Claus Fund jury; three artists in the list (Adewale, Anyah, and Barry) have awardee pages at that fund, which this guide used as sources. Montazami has written on Laatiris and organized his retrospective.

The organizer publishes no country count for 2026. The two tables below group the entries by the label the organizer printed, word for word, so a shared label such as Sénégal/Suisse is its own row and is not added to Sénégal. The paragraph after each table then adds the shared labels in, counting an entry once for every country its label names.

Counted by any mention, the international exhibition has 11 entries with Sénégal (eight alone and three shared), 11 with France (five alone and six shared), four each with Nigeria, Bénin and Maroc, three each with Ghana, Soudan, Afrique du Sud and États-Unis, and two each with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Cabo-Verde, Allemagne and Belgique. The 34 distinct labels name 29 countries between them.

In the Design section, counted the same way, four entries carry Nigeria, three each Sénégal, France and Royaume-Uni, and two each Côte d’Ivoire, Bénin and Mali. The design labels add seven countries that the international list does not have: Côte d’Ivoire, Liban, Burkina Faso, Mali, Botswana, Italie, and Togo. Across both lists the labels name 36 countries.

Why the press totals differ

That figure of 36 is the one Sud Quotidien printed after the launch, for 75 artistic presences. The APS dispatch of September 25 names about 30 countries. Diptyk’s news brief of the same day says 55 artists from 25 countries while naming about 30. The totals move with two choices: whether a shared label counts for one country or for each, and whether Design is included. A cautious reader can say that the artists and designers are tied to more than 30 countries.

Other totals in the press also sit beside the organizer’s without matching it. The organizer counts 75 proposals plus the Grand Témoin and the Carte blanche; APS, before the launch, counted 73 selected artists plus those two to reach 75. Le360 gives 59 works for the international exhibition against the organizer’s 54 entries. Applications are put at about 800, with 600 admissible and 117 from Senegal, by the Secretary General as APS reported in July; the APS launch dispatch says about 900.

Senegal and France

The 11 Senegalese artists are named one by one by APS and by Seneweb, and the organizer’s labels agree: Ibrahima Cissé “Déb’s”, Aliou Diack, Dieye, Pape Diop, Mbaye Babacar Diouf, Cheikh Ndiaye, Ibrahima Niang “Piniang”, and El Hadji Sy under Sénégal alone, with Eva Diallo, Carla Gueye, and Hamedine Kane under shared labels. Diptyk’s brief gives eight, which is the number labelled Sénégal alone. In July the Secretary General had forecast seven to nine, against three or four in earlier editions, APS reported.

Seneweb, citing Le Soleil, and allAfrica report ten artists representing France. The organizer’s list has 11 entries with France in the label, and the press figure is not explained. As set out above, several of those artists are from the Caribbean, the Pacific or French Guiana, or hold a second label from Brazil, Mauritius, Senegal, Benin, Morocco or Cabo Verde.

Women

The organizer publishes no figure. Diptyk’s brief puts women at about 45 percent, 25 of 55, on a base that differs from the official 54. Unconfirmed This guide has not made its own count.

Biennale is independent and is not affiliated with the Biennale de Dakar. Artists, designers, galleries and estates who see an error or a gap in their own entry are invited to write to contact@biennale.nyc with a source; the list will be corrected and the biographies filled as the organizer publishes them.

Sources. Names, spellings, country labels and counts: the Biennale de Dakar’s Sélection 2026 and Section Design pages, both modified October 5, 2026, and the individual artist pages linked from each name, read through the organizer’s post feed on October 6, 2026. Guests and team: the organizer’s posts of October 4 and 5, 2026, the communiqué of September 24 and the internal rules of April 15, 2026. Press: APS, September 25, APS, September 30, APS, July 23, Diptyk, October 1, Sud Quotidien, September 26, Seneweb, September 25, and Le360, October 3. Birth years and practices not marked “organizer” come from the gallery, museum, residency and foundation pages linked in each row, opened on October 6, 2026; most carry no publication date. Directory matches: Biennale’s own records, checked the same day. Everything here is as of October 6, 2026 and should be confirmed with the organizer. Corrections: contact@biennale.nyc.