What does it mean to produce, circulate, and display art in a global context from the viewpoint of Africa's westernmost city, Dakar? One of the ten major biennales in the world, the Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art, is an international exhibition featuring contemporary art produced by artists based on the continent and in the Diaspora. Curators Elise Atangana, Abdelkader Damani, and Ugochukwu Smooth Nzewi organized the eleventh edition of Dak'Art under the theme of “Producing the Common.” This theme took the notion of “Tout monde” from Martinican writer and poet Edouard Glissant, which promotes a vision of a world of flourishing cultural diversity in unanticipated directions underscoring perhaps the global relevance of the experience of precarity and improvisation.
The exhibition took place at Village de la Biennale (a collection of warehouses that served as three exhibition spaces on the Route de Rufisque in the industrial zone of Dakar) and...