The East Africa Art Biennale — EASTAFAB — is the continuing biennial of contemporary art from across the East African Community, founded in January 2003 in Dar es Salaam by the Belgian-born curator and artist Yves Goscinny and Prof. Elias Jengo of the University of Dar es Salaam, and registered that month with the Tanzanian National Council of Arts (BASATA Serial No 1950) as a non-profit, non-governmental and non-commercial association. The institution is headquartered at the University of Dar es Salaam's Department of Fine and Performing Arts, where Prof. Jengo — who co-founded the department (originally the Department of Arts, Music and Theatre, today Fine and Performing Arts) with the Tanzanian painter and diplomat Sam Joseph Ntiro in March 1975 — serves as the Biennale's chairman; Goscinny, who had organised the first Art in Tanzania survey in 1998 and opened his own gallery in East Africa in 2002, has served as Executive Director since the founding. The first edition opened in 2003 at the Tanzania National Museum in Dar es Salaam, with work primarily by artists from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda; subsequent editions have widened the participating geography to include Rwanda, Burundi and, intermittently, artists from Ethiopia and other neighbouring states, with the regional National Committees in Bujumbura, Kampala, Kigali and Nairobi responsible for selecting the artists exhibiting from their own countries.
The announced 11th edition is, at the time of writing, a promotional claim rather than a confirmed exhibition. Materials circulating under the title Common Grounds, New Horizons: Reimagining East African Futures name the Nairobi National Museum as a central exhibition hub for 15 September to 20 November 2026, with satellite programming claimed for Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Kigali and Bujumbura. The institution named as principal venue has publicly repudiated that claim: in a public notice the National Museums of Kenya stated that the event's organisers had used the museum's name and images without consent or authorisation, and that the museum is "not associated with or involved in the event in any capacity." The Biennale's own website has not been updated since the 2017–18 touring edition, and no venue, partner or programme for 2026 has been confirmed through any channel this publication can verify. The dispute itself is the reportable fact; the edition is not.
An institution carried by two people and a department
The structural feature that distinguishes EASTAFAB from the older and better-known African biennials — DAK'ART in Senegal, the Bamako Encounters in Mali, the discontinued Johannesburg Biennale of the 1990s and the state-run Egyptian biennials in Cairo and Alexandria — is the modesty and the intimacy of its institutional architecture. The biennale association is registered as a non-profit dependent for funds on grants, donations and sponsorships from national and international partners; the headquarters are not a freestanding office but a university department; the founding artistic and administrative leadership has rested for two decades on the working partnership of Goscinny, a Belgian curator and artist who arrived in Tanzania through international-organisation postings and stayed, and Jengo, the senior Tanzanian painter whose career — from Makerere University in the 1960s through the founding of the UDSM Department of Arts, Music and Theatre (today Fine and Performing Arts) in 1975 to the chair of the National Arts Council of Tanzania and the founding board chair of Nafasi Art Space in 2008 — is the institutional memory of the modern Tanzanian art scene. The biennale's editions have therefore travelled with the available means: the first two editions were anchored in Dar es Salaam alone; the 5th edition in 2011–12 was the first to take the exhibition across East Africa by road, opening at Dar es Salaam in November 2011 before being transported successively to Arusha (the East African Community headquarters) in January 2012, Nairobi in February, Kampala in March, Kigali in April and Bujumbura in May. The 8th edition in 2017–18, titled Moving Arts Across East African Borders, took the same logic further, opening at Dar es Salaam in November 2017 and continuing to Arusha and Nairobi across the following months.
The institutional argument is that even modest infrastructure — a single university department, a continuing curatorial partnership, a working network of national committees in the five East African capitals, and the goodwill of the regional cultural institutions that have hosted the touring exhibitions — can sustain a continuing regional contemporary art platform across two decades. Whether that argument extends into a third decade is unresolved: the programme has been quiet since the 2017–18 touring edition, and the disputed 2026 announcement — promoted in the institution's name, disclaimed by the museum it names — leaves the institution's future as an open question rather than a scheduled fact.
