El Hadji Sy - 1950s to today
Research Room presented with the researcher and curator Ken Aicha Sy
May - July 2022
A prominent figure of West Africa during the independence era, El Hadji Sy (born in 1954 in Dakar) was presented in Dakar at Selebe Yoon after years of withdrawal from public appearance in his native home, even though he participated in the most important international artistic events in recent years such as Documenta Kassel (2017) or the Biennal of Sao Paulo (2015). After more than fifty years of career, a witness to a colonised society in-transition, an important voice in the development of a new modernity, the itinerary of El Hadji Sy is transnational, travelling and working across Western or African countries such as South Africa on the brink of apartheid. Yet his artistic life profoundly anchors itself in the city he chose not to ever leave, Dakar. As a painter, a cultural activist and the first black curator to collaborate with a western institution in the 1980s, his social commitment and collective initiatives always aimed at an artistic autonomy.
To trace this trajectory, an archival room was conceived with Ken Aicha Sy with a visual and chronological timeline of the artist’s career, archives from the end of the 20th century on the artist and his various collective groups, namely the Laboratoire AGIT’ART, Tenq et Huit Facettes, historical and current interviews of the artist as well as his collaborators such as art historian and curator Clémentine Deliss, art historian Yvette Mutumba, the artist Kan-Si.
Historical catalogues and catalogues dating from the 1980s up to today were made available to the public throughout the exhibition.
About the researcher
Ken Aicha Sy
Ken Aicha Sy was born in Dakar, of a French-Martinican mother, a journalist and a Senegalese and visual artist father. She grew up in the Senegalese capital before going to Paris to study Design and Art History... It is during the period of the World Festival of Black Arts, that Ken Aicha returns to Senegal. Sensitive to the creative environment and the cause of Senegalese artists, she created a cultural platform named Wakh'Art to participate in the valorisation of Senegalese cultural industries. Both producer and curator, Ken Aicha Sy is an active woman in culture. Through her space la Boîte à Idée now installed on the small coast, she fights to follow her motto: she works to make art a factor of development and emancipation.