Group Exhibition - Biennale de Dakar at Ancien Palais de Justice

Dakar Biennale, Official Selection 
At the Ancien Palais de Justice 
Mbaye Diop 

Curator : El Hadji Malick Ndiaye 

June 19 – June 21 2022 

Selebe Yoon is pleased to announce Mbaye Diop’s official participation at the 14th edition of the Dakar Biennale entitled “Ĩ Ndaffa – Forger/Out of the fire”. He was awarded the Dakar Biennale’s UEMOA Prize for his installation « De l’arbre à palabre à l’arbre numérique. 

« De l’arbre à palabre à l’arbre numérique » (From the palaver tree to the numerical tree) is a video installation comv posed of a central screen and several smartphones placed at different heights on a wall with painted black tree branches. The screens are connected with electrical cables that intertwine with the tree branches.  Physical branches painted black are on the floor. The performance displayed on the central screen features a simple action: the artist himself is buried underneath tree branches. Throughout the performance, the sounds of cracking branches and the subtle light of a phone screen start to pierce through the branches. Progressively, Mbaye Diop starts to part with the bough, while remaining possessed by his phone screen. 

This performance was done in Switzerland in July 2019 and was recorded live on social media, generating numerous comments from web users on the relationship between nature and technology. Mbaye Diop collected these comments, made a serigraphy on paper out of them and filmed them as an unfolding instaneous dactylography. The smartphones on the walls display these comments. 

“In African tradition, we had a fundamental relationship with nature: water, wind, sky, earth, mineral and vegetal life… This essential link was believed by our ancestors that these elements were the re-incarnation of our spirit. The tree, for example, had a central place in our daily lives: it was a site of gathering, a symbolic witness to the historical facts of that specific locality, a site of rituals… Today, with the influence of modernity, we witness a paradigm change with the expansion of the “numerical tree” and social media. Information and communication technologies transform these sacred ties that have always existed and shift our sensitivity towards virtual realities.” – Mbaye Diop