Moataz Nasr's success at last month's Dakar Biennale raises a few more questions than it answers, argues Negar Azimi Those aspects of Egypt's contemporary art scene that might be described as African continue to be the subject of debate, and it is a debate that will, if anything, intensify following Moataz Nasr's success at the Dakar Biennale -- Dak'Art 2002 -- which began its fourth round on 5 May. Nasr, an unofficial representative of Egypt, walked away with the Ministry of Culture prize. He was invited to show Ear of Dough, Ear of Clay, the piece that had won him first prize at the 2001 Cairo Biennale. Shipping problems, though, forced a rethink. With a copy of a video piece shown at Cairo's Townhouse Gallery in November, Nasr improvised in grand fashion, constructing around it an installation designed for the space he had been allotted at Dak'Art. At the Townhouse exhibition Nasr had invited the audience to sit in wheel-chairs made from old bicycles while watching a three and a half minute video loop of ripples made by people stepping in a pool of water. "In a theatre, you sit passive," Nasr said of the show. "The wheelchairs locked people in. Unable to move, they feel trapped and implicated in this symbolic crushing." The space in Dakar -- nine metres long, three metres wide, four metres high -- demanded a reconceptualisation. He painted the walls black and projected the video onto a cream-colored textile surface. The floor, in the meantime, was isolated with plastic and covered in a layer of water. The reflection of the video became part of the floor and as the viewers stepped in the water in the room they too became part of the reflection, their presence completing the variable image. From almost 1,600 entries Dak'Art's international selection committee chose 44 artists for the International Exhibition of African Art. Unlike the Venice Biennale, in which countries are represented in national pavilions, Dak'Art showcases the work of individual artists selected by a committee, a process that allows for the kind of originality often stymied by more official selection procedures. (It is, incidentally, a process that has thrown up interesting representations of Egypt in the past -- think of New York-based Egyptian artist Ghada Amer at the Johannesburg Biennale.) While there were many installation pieces, Dakar attracted surprisingly little video art. And among the most conventional genres it was the simplest, the most minimal, that had the greater pay-off. Senegalese participant Soly Cissé employed recycled glass negatives for his portraiture work, while Safaa Erruas from Morocco showed large scale hangings made from textiles, ranging from cotton to silk, that accrued a sense of drama largely because of scale. Some pieces were overtly political. Dominique Zinkpe, an artist originally from Benin but living and working in Berlin, produced a representation of a man bound to a hospital bed by rope and plant roots. The intravenous lines led into colored buckets marked with the names of international aid institutions. Meanwhile, Nigerian artist Emeka Udemba constructed two diverging tunnels -- one, much larger than the other, labeled "US and EU," while the second was branded "Others." Within the larger tunnel lay red plastic flowers, in the smaller metal rods. With an African passport the only requirement for entry, the Dakar Biennale is open to North African artists and also to virtually anyone within the diaspora. Indeed, almost 90 per cent of participants were drawn from the diaspora -- their prevalence was, says Hoda Lotfi, a Cairo-based artist attending the event independently "staring us in the face continually". Whether the Dakar Biennale fell victim to what Nigerian art critic Oladélé Bambgboye recently termed the "curating of cultures" remains debatable. Bambgoyé argues that events embedded within a deliberate cultural trajectory are inherently problematic and that the characterisation of work depending on the regional origins of the artist tends to render exclusive that which it seeks to include, exoticising work deemed outside the mainstream canons of Occidental art. The biennale is undoubtedly a buzzword: these days it spans the globe, from Havana to Johannesburg to Cairo, though with varying degrees of international attention and support from the host cities. What may have distinguished the Dakar event from Cairo's biennales, though, was the blanket participation on the part of the hosts: many participants noted with approval the levels of accessibility and the fact that a vast number of events were hosted outside official venues. TV coverage and general visibility within Dakar was high, and the event was overwhelmingly celebratory in tenor. On 10 June, and flushed with his Dak'Art success, Moataz Nasr broached the issue of arts in Egypt and Africa at a public lecture in the Townhouse Gallery. The audience made up mostly of art students was told that "we need to know why art in Egypt does not receive the same status it has in Dakar, or other cities for that matter." Following the demise of the Johannesburg Biennale, held twice in post- Apartheid South Africa and cancelled in 1998 amid much controversy, the Dakar Biennale has assumed greater significance in attempts to lend credibility to arts on the continent. Chicago-based Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, dismissed as the curator of the ill-fated Johannesburg Biennale, has been named artistic director of this year's Documenta 11, one of the most high profile events of the contemporary scene that opened last week in Kassle, Germany. But whether events such as the Dakar Biennale, or Enwezor's tenure as head of Documenta 11, will have an impact or not is unclear; the likelihood is that many will continue to dismiss art in Africa as a poor attempt to work within predominantly Western modalities. Art historian Salah Hassan argues that exhibitions of African art tend to be judged on a universalist, monolithic scale and are thus subject to a "widespread misconception that contemporary African culture is a distorted copy of Western culture, and therefore lacks authenticity". Modernism emanating from Africa clearly runs the risk of becoming kitsch, perhaps even nostalgic. Do initiatives such as Dak'Art embody political tokenism, or do they signal that the tide is turning onwards dominant modalities and critical perspectives that do not originate exclusively within the West? It is, perhaps, too early to pose such a question, let alone furnish an answer.
