Italy participates in the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar

Italy is participating in the 14th edition of the Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain(Dak’Art 2022), scheduled from May 19 to June 21, 2022, directed by El Hadji Malick Ndiaye. This is the first event of the new project for the internationalization of Italian art, called IT Out OFF the Ordinary, conceived by the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity, which aims to promote Italian artists at major international events through parallel or collateral events. The one in Dakar is planned as an OFF event.

In collaboration with the Directorate General for Public and Cultural Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the Italian Institute of Culture in Dakar, the project has activated a month-long collective residency, in which an Italian artist, an artist from the African diaspora and a Senegalese artist participate, followed by the curatorial gaze of a Dakar cultural figure, with a view to creating cultural connections between Africa and Italy, privileging the female vision of new creative generations. The artists involved are Italian Irene Coppola (Palermo, 1991), former winner of the project Cantica 21. Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere, Senegalese Amy Célestina Ndione (Dakar, 1988) and Italian-Moroccan Leila Bencharnia (El Kelaa, 1993), under the curatorial eye of Senegalese Fatou Kiné Diouf (Dakar, 1993).

The results of the collective residency will be displayed in an exhibition set up at theItalian Cultural Institute in Dakar as a collateral event of the 14th edition of the Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain. Leila Bencharnia will immerse the viewer in a multidimensional listening space; Irene Coppola will present an installation/performance on walking as a practice of writing time and memory; and Amy Célestina Ndione will create a perspective installation that multiplies points of view.

The event will feature fifty-nine artists and artist collectives from Africa and the African diaspora around the concepts of creating, imagining and inventing to build a new common destiny scheduled in the Senegalese capital from May 19 to June 21, 2022.

"The fourteenth edition of the Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain is an important international event that represents an ideal opportunity to promote and support Italian excellence in the field of art," said Culture Minister Dario Franceschini. "With the IT Out OFF the Ordinary project, our country’s art scene has the opportunity to confront the African cultural reality characterized by a great effervescence of ideas and initiatives. In recent years, the different cultural identities of the continent have represented the most new that has managed to impose itself on the international scene."

“This site-specific initiative reflects the programming line of the Institute, which, in promoting Italian culture in Senegal, constantly engages with the vibrant Senegalese artistic and creative scene, always seeking new opportunities for dialogue that can generate the most original and authentic reflections on current issues,” commented the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Dakar.

Italy participates in the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar

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