Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Central Lancashire
Dak'Art 2012
After having worked on Photoquai Biennial, Eyene was invited to co-curate the 2012 edition of Dak’Art with Riason Naidoo, Director of the South African National Gallery (Cape Town) and Nadira Laggoune (Algeria).
Her contribution centred around questioning what aesthetics would define an African language today, and in what way would the latter distinguish itself from what we know about international practices.
She to calls into question the discursive field of conceptualism and posulates upon which history continues to define a genre dominating contemporary art through a Euro- American interpretation.
Visiting Dakar in 2008 as member of jury of the Fondation Blachère Prize, Eyene wrote reviews for Third Text (“Dak’Art 2008: Africa’s Mirror or Distorted Reflection?”) and Africultures.
Created in 2002, Dak’Art is the longest-established biennial of contemporary art in Africa, and a vital resource for art historian, critic, curator or collector interested in contemporary African art. As co-curator of Dak’Art 2012, Eyene was also responsible for the organisation of all the roundtable discussions. She was the lead interlocutor in the partnership developed between Dak’Art and the Pompidou Centre and with Nadira Laggoune supervised the installation of the main exhibition.
The Dak’Art office received 300 applications out of which 42 artists from 21 African countries were selected. Although each curator had independent and sometimes diverging curatorial voices the team collectively curated the international exhibition at Musée Théodore Monod, and strove to ensure the event was a platform for talented emerging artists.
