Who Runs Dak’Art

The man choosing the art for the 16th Dakar Biennale (Dak’Art) had never directed a biennale before April 15, 2026, and he says so himself. Morad Montazami, an art historian and publisher born in France in 1981, was picked by the event’s steering committee after an open call and given about seven months to fill a disused courthouse on Cap Manuel.

Who he is

His birth year and country come from his fellow’s page at the Villa Medici in Rome and his biography at The Mosaic Rooms in London. The Senegalese press agency APS, in a profile of September 30, 2026, describes him as Franco-Iranian and raised in the Pont-de-Sèvres district outside Paris. The organizer’s official biography gives neither, and no source opened for this guide states his degrees.

He worked at Tate Modern in London between 2014 and 2019. The organizer says he developed the museum’s Middle East and North Africa collections; the state daily Le Soleil describes the post more broadly, as covering the Arab and African worlds. He then went independent, founding Zamân Books & Curating, a publishing and exhibition platform for modern and contemporary African, Arab and Asian art.

The exhibitions are the record. He co-curated Casablanca Art School (Tate St Ives, Sharjah Art Foundation and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2023 to 2024) and Présences arabes. Art moderne et décolonisation. Paris 1908-1988 (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, 2024), as ArtReview noted. He is preparing Soleil noir, an exhibition on contemporary art and oil, for the Villa Medici. The Casablanca magazine Diptyk adds that he organized the 2016 retrospective of the Moroccan artist Faouzi Laatiris in Rabat. Unconfirmed Laatiris is the 2026 Grand Témoin (literally, great witness); see the tributes.

How he was chosen

The organizer’s call for curatorial projects is dated February 1, 2026. Projects were due on March 1. The call names the Comité d’orientation, the steering committee, as the body that chooses, and mentions neither a budget nor a venue.

The result came on April 15, as APS reported the next day. Neither the organizer nor The Art Newspaper France gives the number of candidates, and the committee has published no reasons. His own reading, given to APS, is that his ties with artists and institutions in Africa probably earned him the post. He told the agency: “C’est la première fois qu’on me donne cette opportunité de diriger une biennale. C’est un grand signe d’ouverture” (in English: this is the first time I have been given the chance to direct a biennale. It is a great sign of openness).

What he says the edition is for

The theme is (anti)fragilité : arts de la réparation et stratégies du contrecoup. The word comes from the essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose 2012 book Antifragile is footnoted in the concept note Montazami signed in April. He defined it for Diptyk as “cette attitude qui consiste à faire de la fragilité une force expressive” (in English: that attitude which consists in making fragility an expressive strength). The April note had three chapters; the launch communiqué of September 24 lists five curatorial lines, set out on The Exhibitions.

He has promised APS work on ecology in the green spaces of the former courthouse, the main venue, and an art therapy project with Dakar’s psychiatric hospitals. No plan or timetable for either had been published as of October 6, 2026.

He worked fast. The artists’ call closed on June 15. Secretary General Marième Ba told APS on July 23 that about 800 applications came in, 600 of them admissible. The selection published in September counts 54 artists and 21 designers, plus the Grand Témoin and a carte blanche. Diptyk’s critic read the list as short on beginners; Montazami, at the launch, named novelty and emergence among his criteria, by the APS dispatch of September 25. The names are on The Artists & Designers.

The objection, and the answers

Dak’Art is the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, and its 2026 artistic director is not African. The person who has put that most plainly on the record is Montazami. He told Le Soleil on May 27, 2026, that not being African could have counted against him, and that the Biennale chose openness, notably toward the Global South.

Three answers are on the record. The first is his own distance from France (see the quotations). The second is the frame APS gives him, as a connector between African, Arab and Iranian cultures. The third is the team: two of the four exhibition curators are Senegalese, a third is based in Dakar, and the design curator is Franco-Senegalese. The artists’ call stayed reserved for Africa and its diaspora, under the 2026 rules.

One limit should be stated. The research for this guide found no article quoting a named Senegalese artist or critic objecting to the appointment, and the appointment reports record no reaction at all. That is not evidence that nobody minds.

Montazami did not come alone. The organizer published six biographies on its artistic direction page on October 4, 2026. They appear in full on The Artists & Designers.

The Dakar Biennale is a state event. The culture ministry supervises it, and the minister appoints both the Secretary General and the steering committee, under the rules. So a change of government is a change of patron, and 2026 brought one in mid-preparation. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye named Ahmadou Al Aminou Lô Prime Minister by a decree dated May 26, replacing Ousmane Sonko, as vie-publique.sn records. The list of ministers followed in a second decree, which the Prime Minister’s office published under the date of June 1; APS and vie-publique.sn carried it on June 2. The ministry in its present shape, joining culture, crafts and tourism, dates from a reshuffle on September 6, 2025, according to Le Soleil.

What the two men say about culture is consistent, and mostly economic. Faye, in 2024, called the biennale “une activité de référence en matière d’art contemporain en Afrique et dans le monde” (in English: a reference event for contemporary art in Africa and in the world) and spoke of jobs for young people and women. Lô told deputies that sovereignty is also cultural: “elle est ce qui reste quand tout est parti” (in English: it is what remains when everything else has gone), a clause also carried by Teranga Times. One reaction ran the other way: Ndiawar Seck, a cultural organizer from Louga, complained that the speech pushed culture into second place, according to a Xalima headline. Unconfirmed No 2026 budget has been published; see the money and the presidents on Host City.

The rules give the steering committee three jobs: to design the general scheme of the edition, to guarantee its artistic content and to evaluate it afterward. In 2026 it also chose the artistic director.

Its president is Abdoulaye Diop, listed by the organizer as Ministre d’État and described by APS as a former finance minister. He sat on the 2024 committee as a former minister and collector. The date of his appointment as president was not found. At the launch he added a careful sentence about budgets (see the quotations) and wished aloud: “Que cet accompagnement se renforce et se diversifie pour les éditions futures” (in English: may this support grow stronger and more varied for future editions).

Two other bodies remain unnamed. The rules say the works are chosen by a Comité international de sélection and the prizes awarded by a jury of five independent members, whose decisions are final. Neither list had been published as of October 6, 2026. The prizes are on The Exhibitions; the chain of command is on Host City.

The 2026 edition is the 16th, and the arithmetic needs a word. The official count starts in 1992, the first visual-arts biennale. The organizer’s archive calls 2002 the fifth edition and 2010 the ninth; count back, skip 1994 when nothing was held, and 1992 is number one. The 1990 literature biennale carries no number. Yet the institution’s official history also calls 1990 a first edition, and the 2010 edition marked a twentieth anniversary counted from 1990. The safe summary: founded in 1989, first held in 1990, first art biennale in 1992, reserved for African and diaspora artists since 1996, as the anthropologist Thomas Fillitz sets out.

Four points often printed wrong

• Who led 2002. Nobody held the title of artistic director. Universes in Universe, writing at the time, has the edition run by Secretary General Ousseynou Wade with a scientific council under Marie-José Crespin; Fillitz names the Mexico-based Senegalese museologist Éry Camara as president of the selection committee. Yacouba Konaté, in 2006, was the first artistic director.
• When the courthouse came in. The international exhibition entered the Ancien Palais de Justice in 2016, under Njami, as installation views from May 2016 show. In 2014 the venue was a refitted television studio, by Artforum’s review.
• When the OFF began. The OFF is the independent programme around the official one. Three dates circulate because there were three stages: fringe shows from 1996; the name and Mauro Petroni’s catalogue maps from 2000, per Fillitz; formal organization from 2002, the year the organizer counted from when it marked the OFF’s tenth birthday in 2012. Counts per edition are on Dakar Art Scene.
• Who ran the office. Amadou Lamine Sall (1990), Rémi Sagna (to 2000), Ousseynou Wade (November 2000 to early 2013), Babacar Mbaye Diop (from 2013), Marième Ba (since August 2016). Who held the post for the 2016 edition itself was not found.

The two latest prizes rest on press alone, because the organizer’s laureates page is empty. The 2022 winner comes from Contemporary And, which gives the prize as 20 million CFA francs; the 2024 winner from a search excerpt of Africa Radio. The 2024 move from May to November is on Host City. For edition records, see Dak’Art history on My Biennale and the history page.

A biennale lasts a month. The people below are why Dakar has art to show in the other 23. The longer history is on Dakar Art Scene.

Every quotation on this page was read twice, in two separate openings of the source or in the source and a verbatim reprint, and printed only where both readings matched. French is left in French, with a plain English rendering after it. The critics are here on purpose.

Most news about Dak’Art starts in one place. The Agence de Presse Sénégalaise files the dispatches, and the dailies and aggregators reprint them, often word for word. Three outlets agreeing may be one dispatch. Feeds and accounts to follow are on Live.

No 2026 Dak’Art article was found in Jeune Afrique, RFI, Le Monde Afrique, Artnet News, ARTnews or Artsy, nor in the Dakar dailies L’Observateur, EnQuête, Walf Quotidien and Le Témoin. The search had limits on the day; this is no proof that none exist. For older editions, Africultures has the best free archive on 2002 and 2008, and an interview with El Hadji Malick Ndiaye about his 2022 edition is at Africa Is a Country.

Biennale is independent and not affiliated with the organizer. Everything here is as of October 6, 2026; confirm with the organizer. Records are kept on My Biennale’s Dak’Art page and its artist list.