Rethinking Performance As Archive Through The Practice of El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb
In 2012, the Senegalese government sold the site of the former Lat Dior military camp in Dakar to private investors.
El Hadji Sy standing in front of the stage design he created for ‘Plehanov 7, les cendres de Pierre Lods’ (‘Plehanov 7, the Ashes of Pierre Lods’), 19 January 1990, Théâtre de Verdure du Centre Culturel Français de Dakar. Courtesy of Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Collection Axt/Sy.
Much has been said on the apparent unreadability of the Laboratoire’s work, in the form of outside criticism and as a rebuttal from within the collective. Clémentine Deliss, a key collaborator and member of the Laboratoire since the 1990s has warned that investigation into their work runs the risk of crystallising the commodification of what she describes as ‘alternative theories of knowledge production’.
I will begin with a discussion of the term ‘archive’, to frame the way that I will employ it throughout this paper, before moving on to consider how archives were used in President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s post-independence nation-building project in Senegal. I will then trace the birth and development of the Laboratoire as a response to Senghor’s cultural policy, using their ideological leanings to underpin a discussion on certain key performances that exemplify the artists’ performed and embodied archival approach.
Issa Samb during an impromptu performance in his studio. Dakar, 2016. Photo by / Courtesy of Amy Sall
The archive, its position in post-independence Senegalese history and the birth of the Laboratoire Agit’Art.
In mainstream discourse, definitions of the archive generally revolve around the principle of organising source-based knowledge, with a particular focus on the material document. Jacques Derrida has noted that the etymology of the term has been traced to the Greek arkheion, pertaining to the house of lawmakers, imbuing the term with a paternalistic function.
Tensions between documentation and embodied action are particularly pertinent when considering performance art and its connotations of ephemerality. The question of the archive has in itself been central to the development of strategies for categorising performance in the arts, as highlighted by Peggy Phelan’s oft-cited statement that performance ‘becomes itself through disappearance’.
Diana Taylor has written extensively on this, largely in the context of Latin American performance and history.
If arguing for a revaluation of Sy and Samb’s approach to the archive, it is important therefore to acknowledge the historical precedent in Senegal which the two artists would go on to collapse. Under President Léopold Sédar Senghor, following independence from France the Republic of Senegal was imagined through the prism of négritude. In short, for Senghor négritude signified the existence of a specific African cultural identity shared by Black communities across the world.
Fig 1. Woman Pounding, 1968 by Modou Niang. Tapestry
Fig 2. La Marche, 1978 by El hadji Sy. Oil on canvas. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, Edited by. C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015.
It is within this local context that the Laboratoire Agit’Art came into being. Samb talks about burning his landscape paintings that had been selected by Senghor to represent the country in 1974 at Paris’ Grand Palais.
The origins of the Laboratoire are very much rooted in theatre; during their first workshops at the Lat Dior Village the group collaborated with the experimental troupe Les Tréteaux
It is worth pausing briefly on the significance of the Set setal; Sy and Samb were fundamental in encouraging the movement, which means to be and make clean in Wolof, the most widely spoken vernacular language in Senegal. The coming together of notions of bodily cleanliness and urban regeneration suggests the importance of the body in enacting societal change. The Set setal was for many a way of forging new local narratives as Senegal was subjected to the upheaval of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programmes under President Abdou Diouf, Senghor’s successor.
El Hadji Sy painting hanging in the streets of Niaye Thioker, Dakar.
Fig. 3. Film still from Prisma Afrika (1992); Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
Building on this opening discussion of the Laboratoire’s relationship to the body and history, I will now focus on their 1995 performance SOS Culture to expand on and analyse in greater depth the way Sy and Samb use embodied practice to challenge perspectives on the archive.
Mummification and memorials - the repertoire performed in SOS Culture.
In 1995 the UK played host to a huge festival of African art, africa95. It took place across multiple locations and encompassed a vast array of work, from an exhibition of philanthropist Jean Pigozzi’s private collection at the Serpentine Gallery to a photography show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. SOS Culture was performed by El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb at the opening night of the Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (referred to hereafter as Seven Stories) exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, curated by Clementine Deliss in collaboration with several artists from the African continent including Sy.
I pause on the controversy surrounding SOS Culture because as mentioned it points to a need on the part of audience members for epistemological containment and control, one of the raisons d’être of archives. What’s more, today it is far easier to access reviews of the exhibition than to view films of the performance itself. The epistemologically anxious critiques of the show have come to take up a significant part of the most readily accessible archives of the performance. What can be understood as a double knowledge anxiety thus takes place, as the temporal ephemerality of the performance, underpinned by its confusing content, keeps it untenable and on the surface unknown. The first aspect of Seven Stories that seemed to confound critics was the collaborative format of the exhibition. This was an extension of the methodology of the Laboratoire and one of its partner initiatives Tenq. Tenq, meaning joint or articulation in Wolof, was a programme of workshops, discussions and exhibitions that began in the original Village des arts. In 1994 Sy and Deliss brought together international artists for a two-week Tenq workshop at the French lycée in Saint Louis, Senegal’s northern-most city that sits over three hundred kilometres from Dakar (fig. 4).
Fig 4. El Hadji Sy with school children in his studio at Tenq, Saint Louis, 1994. Photo by Djibril Sy
Fig 5. Issa Samb and El Hadji Sy; SOS Culture, Whitechapel Gallery London, 1995. Photo by Clémentine Deliss. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
One of the most vocal critics of Seven Stories was Okwui Enwezor who in early 1996 published an article in Frieze magazine that ripped the curatorial strategy to shreds.
In order to further challenge Enwezor’s critique, I wish now to take a closer look at SOS Culture through a prism of different writing on performance and knowledge. For Diana Taylor, performance provokes subject awareness through its very avoidance of direct translatability; it is mediated by the gap between the performer’s and viewer’s knowledge and corporeal experience.
If embodied action is a way of challenging epistemological containment, then Samb’s deployment of foreign languages during SOS Culture further complicates how a viewer might try to gain an understanding of the performance. In an avant-garde move, reminiscent of Hugo Ball’s 1916 Karawane performance, he rejects logocentrism by pushing audience members towards a need for translation.
Della Pollock has traced the coming together of performance studies and oral histories, arguing that from the 1970s onwards the performativity of oral history had been recognised, thus opening up new possibilities for ways of thinking about those histories.
Nonetheless, I wish to draw out an aspect of oral history that sets it apart from the material archive, namely its more explicitly dialogical nature. Samuel Schrager describes oral history as an ‘on-going history of dialogic relations’ and the importance of a collective experience of orality, particularly in West Africa, points to a general understanding of oral storytelling that places social relations at its heart.
The final point that I wish to discuss with regards to SOS Culture is the way that Sy and Samb call upon death and rebirth to problematise what Rebecca Schneider describes as the death-defying impulse that drives the archive, and that has informed the extent to which performance is received as an affront in this arguably Western logic.
Fig 6. The Laboratoire Agit'Art courtyard, Dakar, 1992. Photo by Clémentine Deliss. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, Diaphanes. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes 2015
Fig 7. Installation by El Hadji Sy in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, 1996. Photo by Clémentine Deliss
Focusing on SOS Culture, death is a theme that appears explicitly. Early in the performance, Sy and Samb bring an object that resembles a mummified corpse onto the stage, after which Samb proceeds to mummify Sy who remains wrapped in bandages for almost the duration of the performance. It comes as no surprise that death featured so centrally in the performance when we know that shortly prior to the opening of the exhibition Laboratoire member Youssoupha Dione had suddenly passed away. In fact, Samb had arrived at Heathrow airport for the show pulling an effigy of the playwright along the ground (fig.7).
El Hadji Sy and the art object as prop in ‘repertoire’.
In SOS Culture El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb enacted a highly performative relationship to the object, wherein the performativity of the art object itself was not denied. I turn now to an enquiry into the solo work of Sy and the way in which he has continuously used art objects as props in a larger and self-aware performance of knowledge, memory and history. The destruction of the original Village des arts undoubtedly went some way towards thrusting these concerns to the centre of Sy’s work, indeed it was after the eviction that Sy began to place large numbers of his pieces in the care of Friedrich Axt, the now deceased German linguist and collector.
As early as 1975 Sy was involved in theatre work, designing the set for Ibrahima Sall’s play Le choix - Madior. Placed alongside his foot paintings and jute pieces, his early practice is illuminating in that it highlights the way in which he enters into a choreography with art objects.
El Hadji Sy performance at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo by Clementine Deliss, 1995
Fig 8. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
A preoccupation with gaps and spaces in-between is central to the work of Samb and Sy, as I have shown throughout this dissertation. It is also a concern around which much discussion of the archive has been revolving since the global turn of the late 1980s. Speaking about the lack of artistic archives in the Middle East, Anthony Downey argues that these art historical gaps are fertile ground for the emergence of new dynamics of knowledge,
For Sy, the viewer has an integral role to play in this process of exploring the gaps between that which is known and that which is not. In his 2003 exhibition Joola at Dakar’s Artefact Gallery, Sy provided a demonstration of how history and the archive could be challenged by asking the viewer to enter into a highly performative relationship with the art object. Joola references the ferry that whilst travelling from Senegal’s southern city Ziguinchor to Dakar in September 2002 sank off the coast of the Gambia, resulting in approximately two thousand deaths and going down as the second most deadly maritime accident in history. The event shook the Senegalese nation, and Sy speaks of other human dramas that informed the vernissage-performance (opening-performance) of Joola such as the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York.
Fig 9. Exhibition goers at the opening-performance of Joola by El Hadji Sy at Galerie Artefact, Dakar, 2003. Photo by Mamadou Touré Behan. Reproduced from El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics. Edited by C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba; Diaphanes, 2015
Fig 10. Demain dans nos deux mains ("Tomorrow is in our hands") street performance. Les Petites Pierres, Dakar. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Joire, 2012
Conclusion
Tracing key moments in the practice of El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb, I have shown that both artists have used performative methods to challenge the archival process and that their work adds to an already rich discussion on the relationship between knowledge transmission and performance. Coming of age during the presidency of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sy and Samb along with the Laboratoire Agit’Art rebelled against the leader’s political co-optation of art objects into the national archive of négritude. From the end of the 1970s and throughout the following decade they destroyed artworks or reconfigured them as props to collectively disrupt and rethink the narratives that shaped the urban environment of Dakar. In 1995 their performance SOS Culture at London’s Whitechapel Gallery provoked discomfort among critics, a deliberate tactic on their part to push the boundaries of how audience members could expect to consume knowledge and engage in its organisation and transmission. Sy has also worked within institutional archives to highlight the performativity of the archival process.
By way of conclusion, I return to the Village des arts. Since 1996 it has been housed in a former Chinese workers’ camp in the north of the Dakar peninsula, a gift to Tenq from the Senegalese Ministry of Culture. A further dislocation has taken place in recent years as Sy has worked extensively in rural parts of Senegal with social practice group Huit Facettes to challenge the increasingly fast-growing dominance of the urban over the rural in the twenty-first century, particularly in Africa.
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SenewebNews. Boulimie foncière : Le terrain de l’ex-camp Lat Dior morcelé et vendu à des privés, un architecte décide de porter plainte contre l’Etat. Seneweb, 02 April 2012, https://www.seneweb.com/news/Societe/boulimie-fonciere-le-terrain-de-l-rsquo-ex-camp-lat-dior-morcele-et-vendu-a-des-prives-un-architecte-decide-de-porter-plain_n_63271.html, Accessed on 20 January 2016. ↩
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Issa Samb also goes by the alias Joe Ouakam ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms: Laboratoire AGIT’art and Tenq in Dakar in the 1990s’ in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 36 (Summer 2014), p.19 ↩
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In 2014 both Sy and Samb had solo exhibitions in Europe, in Frankfurt and London respectively. Sy’s exhibition Painting, Performance, Politics is currently on show in Prague. ↩
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J. Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. E. Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p.2 ↩
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Ibid., p.3 ↩
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A. Dickerson, ‘Archival Life in the New Century; Considerations of Mission and Structure for African-Centred Institutions’ in Third Text, vol. 54, Spring 2001, Kala Press, p.101 ↩
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S. Hall, ‘Constituting an archive’ in Third Text, vol. 54, Spring 2001, Kala Press, p.89 ↩
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R. Schneider, ‘Performance Remains’ in Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 6:2, 2001, p.103 ↩
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P. Phelan, ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’ in Unmarked; the politics of performance, Routledge, 1992, p.146 ↩
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S. Lütticken, Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art, NAi Publishers, 2005, p.165 ↩
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To name but three examples from 2016; Performing for the Camera (Tate Modern), The sun went in, the fire went out: landscapes in film, performance and text (Chelsea Space) and Rose English; A Premonition of the Act (Camden Arts Centre) ↩
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D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003 ↩
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D. Taylor, p.21 ↩
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J. Roach quoted in D. Taylor, p.5 ↩
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C. Fusco, ‘The Other History of Intercultural Performance’ in TDR (1988-), Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), p.149 ↩
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L. S. Senghor, Ce que je crois: Négritude, Francité et Civilisation de l’Universel, Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1988, p.136 ↩
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J. L. Grabski, ‘The Historical Invention and Contemporary Practice of Modern Senegalese Art: Three Generations of Artists in Dakar’ Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 2001, University of Indiana, p.75 ↩
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See Alioune Sene’s foreword to Cultural Policy in Senegal, UNESCO, Paris, 1973 ↩
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K. Kouoh, ed.,Word! Word? Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form, Sternberg Press, 2013, p.13 ↩
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W. Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, Verso 1998, p.94 ↩
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A. Bathily, Mai 1968 à Dakar: ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie, Chaka, 1992 ↩
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J. L. Grabski, p.81 ↩
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Ibid., p.80 ↩
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C. Deliss, 2014, p.5 ↩
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Other early members include filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety, poet Thierno Seydou Sall and painter Fodé Camara ↩
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J. L. Grabski, p.92 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers: Laboratoire Agit’Art, Tenq and Huit Facettes in Dakar in the 1990s’, video, part of Artists as Curator: Collaborative Practices symposium, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 19.04.2013, http://www.afterall.org/online/_artist-as-curator_collaborative-practices_symposium_artists-as-model-engineers_laboratoire-agit_art/#.VxTGJk32aHs ↩
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The Lebou are an ethnic group who since the fifteenth century have been present in the Dakar region, and from which Issa Samb hails. See A. Sylla, Le people Lébou de la presqu’île du Cap-Vert, Les Nouvelles Editions africaines du Sénégal, 1992 ↩
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I. Samb, ‘Mediums de Transformation’, Metronome, ed. C. Deliss, No.0, May, Dakar, 1996, p.2 ↩
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A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. V. Corti, Calder Publications, 1993, p.70 and p.73 ↩
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Ibid., pp. 81 - 87 ↩
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M. Diouf, ‘Wall Paintings and the Writing of History: Set/Setal in Dakar’ in GEFAME: Journal of African Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2005, accessed via http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=gefame;cc=gefame;q1=dlps;rgn=main;view=text;idno=4761563.0002.102 ↩
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J. L. Grabski, p.94 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers: Laboratoire Agit’Art, Tenq and Huit Facettes in Dakar in the 1990s’ ↩
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M. Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus and the Black Arts Movement, The University of Michigan Press, 2005, p.220 ↩
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The other artist-curators were Chika Okeke, Salah M. Hassan, David Koloane and Wanjiku Nyachae ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms’, p.11 ↩
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For more information on the Tenq workshops see C. Deliss ‘Brothers in Arms’ ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers’ ↩
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Interview with Hassan Musa as part of artist interviews from Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa, VHS, Whitechapel Gallery Archives, London ↩
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O. Enwezor, ‘Occupied Territories’ in Frieze, issue 26, Jan-Feb 1996, pp.36 - 41 ↩
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Ibid., p.39 ↩
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Ibid., p.38 ↩
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Ibid., p.37 ↩
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T. J. Clark, ‘Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of “Olympia” in 1865’ in Screen (1980), 21:1, pp.18 - 42 ↩
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D. Taylor, p.15 ↩
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M. Sell, p.82 ↩
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Ibid ↩
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R. Schneider, p.103 ↩
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C. Ugwu, Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance ed. Catherine Ugwu, Bay Press Seattle, ICA London, 1995 ↩
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Elizabeth Harney explores the interplay between the vanguards of the avant-garde and the Laboratoire Agit’Art in ‘Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London’ in New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4, Autumn 2010, pp.731 - 751 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms’, p.16 ↩
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D. Pollock, ‘Moving Histories: performance and oral history’ pp. 120 - 135 in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies ed. Tracy C. Davis, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p.120 ↩
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V. Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, University of Arizona Press, 1985, p.167 ↩
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J. Jansen, The griot’s craft; an essay on oral tradition and diplomacy, Hamburg, LIT, 2000, p.10 ↩
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Field interview with author conducted in November, 2015 ↩
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D. Pollock, p.123 ↩
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J. Derrida, p.90 ↩
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R. Schneider, p.101 ↩
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Ibid., p.103 ↩
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Ibid., p.101 ↩
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‘Curator Koyo Kouoh on Issa Samb’s exhibition at Iniva’, 2014, video available online http://www.iniva.org/exhibitions_projects/2014/issa_samb/koyo_kouoh_video ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Brothers in Arms’, p.11 ↩
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Ibid., p.14 ↩
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I. Samb, 1996 ↩
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P. Phelan, p.156 ↩
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C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba, eds., El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, Diaphanes, 2015, p.11 ↩
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C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba, 2015, p.14 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Free Fall - Freeze Frame; Africa, exhibitions, artists’ in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. B. W. Ferguson, R. Greenberg and S. Nairne, Routledge, 2005, p.207 ↩
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E. H. Sy quoted by C. Deliss, lecture part of Experience as Institutions: Artist collectives and cultural platforms in Africa, Tate Modern, 29.11.2013, video availible online http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/experience-institution-artist-collectives-video-recording ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘Artists as Model Engineers’ ↩
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W. Benjamin, p.87 ↩
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C. Deliss and Y. Mutumba, 2015, p.11 ↩
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J. Grosse and E. H. Sy, ‘El Hadji Sy in conversation with Julia Grosse: The Artwork becomes a socialised object, enhanced and embellished by the community’ in El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, p.42 ↩
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I. Ebong, ‘Negritude: Between Mask and Flag. Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the “Ecole de Dakar”’ in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace ed. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, Iniva, London, 1999, p.141 ↩
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A. Downey, ed., Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East, I.B.Tauris, 2015, p.20 ↩
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S. Hall, p.91 ↩
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M. Schwich, ‘Cardiology of a Life’s Work’ in El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, p.351 ↩
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C. Deliss, ‘The Parallax View’ in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 1 (1999), p.54 ↩
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J. Pires ‘Sénégal: El Sy à la galerie Artefact: un peintre et ses glissements d’identités’ on AllAfrica, 19.04.2003, http://fr.allafrica.com/stories/200304210031.html (accessed 18.02.2016) ↩
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D. Taylor, p.24 ↩
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Mamadou Diouf, ‘El Hadji Sy and the quest for a post-negritude aesthetics’ in El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics, p.138 ↩
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J. Grosse and E. H. Sy, 2015, p.45 ↩
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Kan-Si ‘Huit Facettes : A Reply from Kan-Si’ in Documenta 11_Platform 5 : Exhibition : Catalogue, eds. H. Ander and N. Rottner, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002, pp.570 - 571 ↩
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M-T. Champesme, L’universel? Dialogues avec Senghor, Face à Face, 2004 ↩
May 2020. Vol nº1