Issa Samb, El Hadji Sy, Kan-Si: 80-90, Deviation

Alongside the 16th Dakar Biennale, Selebe Yoon presents “80-90, Deviation”, a group exhibition bringing together historical works created during the 1980s and 1990s by Senegalese artists Issa Samb (1945–2017), El Hadji Sy (b.1954), and Amadou Kan-Si (b.1961).

Belonging to three different generations, each of them asserted, in his own way, an aesthetics of rupture at the end of the 20th century, while simultaneously redefining the artist’s place and social function through various collective initiatives, including the Laboratoire Agit’Art (1974), the Village des Arts (1977), Tenq (1980), and the Huit Facettes collective (1996), deployed on both a local and international scale.

Painting with their feet or hands, piercing the surface of the canvas, allowing works to evolve through continual exposure to natural elements and the city, freeing oneself from the frame: all three artists experimented with a wide range of materials and gestures, turning painting into a true space of action. From the 1970s onwards, the elders, Samb and Sy, opposed both the cultural ideology of Négritude championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor and the formalism of the École de Dakar. Upon graduating from the Beaux-Arts de Dakar in 1991, Kan-Si affirmed the need for artists to self-organize and create their own frameworks for action. At different moments, each artist thus restored art’s social resonances, its entanglement with local realities, and its power to provoke political upheaval.