When Dak'Art opened its inaugural visual-arts edition in 1992, it was the first major international biennial in the world organised on the explicit institutional premise that the African contemporary art conversation could and should be organised from within Africa.
Dak'Art was established by Senegalese cultural-policy decree in December 1989 — the culmination of a long Senegalese cultural-policy argument that traces to Léopold Sédar Senghor's continuing institutional project across his presidency (1960–1980) and beyond. Senghor — the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman who co-developed the Négritude movement of the 1930s with Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, and who was the first president of post-independence Senegal — had organised the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (the World Festival of Black Arts) in Dakar in April 1966, the founding event of the post-independence international Pan-African cultural conversation. The 1966 festival is the institutional precursor of the Dak'Art biennial, and the Senghor-era Senegalese cultural-policy argument — that the Pan-African cultural conversation deserved institutional infrastructure organised from Africa, on African terms — organised the institutional case for the biennial across the two decades between 1966 and 1989. President Abdou Diouf, Senghor's continuing political successor, decreed the biennial into existence in December 1989.
The 1st Dak'Art (1990) was a literary biennial. The institutional argument shifted under continuing internal cultural-policy debate, and the 2nd Dak'Art (1992) opened as the inaugural visual-arts edition — the founding biennial of the contemporary Pan-African biennial form as we now recognise it. The 1992 edition established the biennial's continuing institutional architecture: a Pavilion d’Honneur invited international Pan-African artists and an Exposition Internationale presented work selected through a continental open call across the Pan-African contemporary art conversation. The 3rd Dak'Art (1996) and 4th Dak'Art (1998) under successive Senegalese cultural-administrative directors extended the biennial's institutional infrastructure and established Dak'Art's continuing institutional position as the Pan-African contemporary art biennial.
The 5th Dak'Art (2002), curated by the Ivorian art historian and curator Yacouba Konaté, consolidated the biennial's curatorial-institutional ambition and established Dak'Art's reading by the international art press as a major institutional event in the post-2000 international biennial conversation. The Konaté period across the 2002 and 2006 editions — both Konaté-curated, the 2006 with international collaborators including Salah Hassan and N'Goné Fall — extended the biennial's engagement with the post-2000 Pan-African contemporary art conversation that was developing across the network of African contemporary art institutions (the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the Cape Town and Marrakech contemporary art conversations, the Pan-African contemporary art generation including El Anatsui, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Yinka Shonibare, Ghada Amer, Wangechi Mutu, William Kentridge, and the post-1994 South African contemporary art generation that emerged through the Johannesburg Biennale of the 1990s).
The 11th Dak'Art (2014), curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Elise Atangana, and Abdelkader Damani under the title Producing the Common (9 May – 8 June 2014), drawing the notion of "Tout-monde" from the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, was the curatorially-most-acclaimed of the post-2010 editions and extended the biennial's institutional position into the post-2010 international Pan-African contemporary art conversation. The 12th Dak'Art (2016), Reenchantments, and the 13th Dak'Art (2018), The Red Hour: A Call for New Imaginaries — both curated by Simon Njami, the Cameroonian-French curator and writer who is among the most internationally visible curators of African contemporary art of his generation — established the biennial's continuing institutional reading by the international art press, and extended the biennial's institutional case for the Pan-African contemporary art conversation as a international curatorial proposition.
The 14th Dak'Art was originally scheduled for 2020 and was postponed to 2022 by the Covid-19 pandemic. When the 14th Dak'Art (Ĩ NDAFFA # / Forger / Out of the Fire, curated by Dr El Hadji Malick Ndiaye with co-curators Anna Karima Wana and Delphine Buysse) opened from 19 May to 21 June 2022, the institutional conditions had shifted — the post-2020 economic conditions across the African continent, the Senegalese cultural-policy environment, the continuing post-pandemic conditions of the international biennial form. The 14th edition was nonetheless one of the most extensively-programmed of the biennial's continuing institutional history, with an Exposition Internationale across the Ancien Palais de Justice and an extensive OFF programme — the network of independent satellite exhibitions across Dakar that had developed alongside the biennial across the post-2000 period and that now constitutes a parallel biennial of institutional consequence.
The 15th Dak'Art was postponed multiple times across 2023–2024 — by continuing Senegalese cultural-policy conditions, by the 2024 Senegalese presidential election that brought President Bassirou Diomaye Faye to power on a cultural-policy-reform platform, and by the continuing institutional restructuring of the biennial's organisational architecture across the post-election period. The 15th Dak'Art ultimately opened on 7 November 2024 under artistic director Salimata Diop — the first woman to hold the artistic-director position at the biennial — titled The Wake / L'Éveil / Xàll wi (a title drawn from Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016), with an Exposition Internationale of 58 artists from Africa and the diaspora across the Ancien Palais de Justice and the network of OFF satellite venues, running through 7 December 2024. The biennial's continuing institutional argument across the post-2024 period — that the Pan-African contemporary art conversation requires state-supported institutional infrastructure, and that the Senegalese cultural-policy tradition from Senghor through Diouf, Wade, Sall, and Faye has continued to support that argument across political transitions — has held for thirty-five years.
The institutional architecture
Dak'Art is organised by the Secrétariat Général de la Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain, a state cultural body operating under the Senegalese Ministry of Culture. Continuing institutional support comes from the Senegalese state, the City of Dakar, the network of African and international cultural-cooperation organisations (Institut français, the Goethe-Institut, the OIF Organisation internationale de la Francophonie), and the private-philanthropic and corporate-philanthropic base. The OFF programme — the network of independent satellite exhibitions that has developed alongside the biennial since the early 2000s — extends the biennial's institutional reach into Dakar's continuing contemporary art conversation and constitutes a parallel institutional architecture of its own.
