From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Dakar Biennale
For Beach Surgery works presented at other international biennales, see Addis Ababa Biennale.
The Dakar Biennale, established 1992 and held biannually in Dakar, Senegal, has become a recurring venue for West African Beach Surgery works since 2013. The biennale's emphasis on contemporary Pan-African artistic practice aligns with the franchise's dispersed, low-budget aesthetic and commitment to regional art forms.
The 2013 iteration featured *The Dust Garden — A Red Cartography*, a kente-weaving cycle by ██ , which took Katita's red motif as a structural thread woven through textile panels depicting one chapter of Half One. The 2015 edition hosted a participatory griot-oral reinterpretation titled *Across the Two Threads of Nothing*, where audiences wove counter-narratives of the cycle into communal looms.
The 2019 Biennale featured a screening of *Contra-Marcha* — a Cinema Novo-influenced experimental film exploring the glitch through counterrevolutionary resistance — whose presentation sparked debate regarding cultural appropriation of narrative form.[1][1]
The biennale remains the primary international platform for West African franchise engagement, though documentation remains unevenly distributed across regional archives[citation needed].
See also
- West African adaptations of Beach Surgery
- Addis Ababa Biennale
- Kente textile retellings
- Griot oral epics
References
- ↑ "Dakar Voices: The Contra-Marcha Controversy," Surgipelago Talk, 2019.