Dak’Art 2016, Novelty and the Pale of History

Abstract

This essay attempted a comprehensive and encompassing narrative that strides towards connecting the DakArt 2016 exhibition as a discourse of African artists’ search by African artists for personal quests centered on self for endogenous visions directed at deconstructing perceptions and fixed notions of self (with notions of identity shifts, nomardism and cross-culturalism as) key to originality in creativity. The approach is historical; grounding the subject “the use of recyclables and ready-mades for the creation of art” as the cynosure of the historicity of the new in the disentanglement from Dakarois Negritude inspired art. Investigating the effect of colonial materiality employed by three artists, utilising colonial era aesthetics in their work while circumventing its indexicality; finding instead new methods with which to represent individual experiences. That new art form, thus, reflected the political, social, consciousness and avant-gardes’ whirlwind stepped up in the 1990’s via the Texts Revue Noire and NKA. In their “complexfication”, the cognomen as a scaffolding of Euro-African postmodernism smuggled in an international message of Conservation via creative utilisation of commonplace products for art making. The strengths of the hermeneutic discourses of the art works yield insights for critical social commentary and education. DakArt 2016 points the way forward.

Key Words: DakArt 2016, Comprehensive, “Encompassing narrative”, Deconstruction, Conservation, Creative, Postmodernism