In 2016, internationally renowned curator Simon Njami was commissioned to organize Dak'Art, the oldest “Biennale of Contemporary African Art” founded in Senegal in 1989, and since then the central contemporary arts event on the continent. For this twelfth edition, Njami alluded to the poem “Guélowâr où Prince,” of Négritude writer and the country's former president Léopold S. Senghor:
This verse points to the high aspirations before and during African independence movements, at the dawning of a post-colonial age. Inspired by Senghor's lines, Njami ambitiously positioned Dak'Art to become “a new Bandung for Culture,”2 in reference to the 1955 conference in Indonesia with its Afro-Asian alliance, transferring the historic idea of solidarity among nations of the Southern hemisphere to the contemporary global artworld. Such connections are promoted in favor of a historically coherent and strong antidote to the still very present domination of the Euro-American art system.
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