Senegalese art archived and forgotten: Ken aicha sy is looking for her father’s pictures

The pictures of the Senegalese artist El Hadji Sy were one of the highlights of the Gallery Weekend in Berlin in 2022, at which Documenta 14 stood and his large-format painting in the documenta hall in the Karlsaue. In the current exhibition in the IFA gallery there is not a single original of him. Only two granular reproductions of his abstract figurative paintings. The show, curated by Ken Aicha Sy, the artist’s daughter, tells of a painful empty space.

Sy shows the result of a five -year research in the Gallery of the Institute for Foreign Relations (IFA), in which she went on the footsteps of her 70 -year -old father in Europe. The exhibition is a surprising, varied staged mix of research and overview of Senegal’s art scene between 1960 and 1990, which works with a lot of text material and little works of art and is still engaging.

Where are the pictures of El Hadji sy?

In her exhibition “Survival Kit. Between Us and History: The Hidden Archive”, SY reports of obstacles in research that she draws attention to hegemonic structures in museums that still affect contemporary art from Africa. In this regard, the exhibition fits well with the concept with which Ayla Sebti, head of the IFA gallery, started in 2016. With the transdisciplinary series “Untie to Tie”, Sebti wanted to invite you to a discourse on the long -term consequences of colonialism.

As the starting point for her search, Ken Aicha Sy names the death of her mother, the journalist and cultural activist Anne Jean Bart, in 2019. When sorting the estate, she came across the family archive, which contained photos and articles from Bart, which was published in the newspaper “Le Soleil” and held subjective key moments of the contemporary Senegalian art scene – with El Hadji Sy as central figure.

Since Sy did not grew up with her father, a lot was new territory for her. Why is her father’s creation hardly known in Senegal? Why wrote almost exclusively German or American authors about contemporary art in the West African country, she asked herself and traveled to Germany. Later she uses a residency at the ZK/U in Moabit to research her father’s former exhibition locations.

El sys performative painting

The painter, curator and activist El Hadji Sy, born in Senegal in 1956, deliberately turned against the painting of the “School of Dakar” since the 1960s and the cultural term “Négritude” prescribed by the former Senegalese President and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor.

In his art, El S wanted to emancipate himself from the state line, he rejects the label “African Art”. He was the founder and member of interdisciplinary, performative and socially working artist collectives such as Laboratoire Agit’art and Tenq, founded artist villages in abandoned colonial buildings or workers’ apartments. For years he painted his pictures with his feet, used jute bags, baking sheets and what he found in his area as a painting ground.

As early as 1989, he curated the first overview of the contemporary art of his home country for the Ethnological Museum (later World Heritage Museum) in Frankfurt am Main. In 2015 there was a large single show of his painting, curated by the artist himself, the then director Clémentine Deliss and Philippe Pirotte as rector of the Städelschule.

Ken Aicha Sy used the associated publications and works of art recorded in it as the basis for her research, which she mainly led to the World Heritage Museum in Frankfurt am Main and Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, which also collected contemporary art from Africa and worked with El S.

Not too much light on the picture

You can tell Ken aicha sy how much she moves the fact that part of Senegalese art history disappears in western museum archives or in private collections, while the associated knowledge in Senegal is missing. Although she had the opportunity to get access to archives in Germany, most of her compatriots don’t have this chance, she says on the tour of the exhibition. A wall shows SYS network of museum people, companions and curators who supported their research in Europe.

In this exhibition you can sit on carpets and video interviews of Senegalese artists and scientists who have excavated SY. A library has the groundbreaking anthology El Sys ready for leafing through, as well as a mixture of magazine and catalog, a “Magalogue” that SY wants to publish accompanying their research.

The World Heritage Museum has borrowed six paintings to Berlin, SY presented it in such a way that the backs can also be seen that provide information on provenance. The abstract blue-yellow painting “Nocturne” by Théodore Diouf from 1985 is attributed to the École de Dakar. A number on the back reveals that someone paid 150,000 CFA Franc, the equivalent of around 220 euros. Today it is worth a lot more, the sum insured accordingly. Bringing pictures like this to Senegal is expensive and makes an exhibition at its place of origin unrealized. The Frankfurt Museum also has conservative concerns.

El Hadji Sys pictures stay in the basement

Another loan from Frankfurt, “Le Acrobat Qui Sante La Lune” by Amadou BA, may only hang with the back of the museum in the IFA gallery. Painted in a country with a glistening sun, it should be protected from light in Germany. “Maybe I would have liked to bathe in direct light”, Sy lets the painting say in one of her poetic exhibition texts. “Turn around, I’m there.” Presumably follows the state of light European museum standards. Ken aicha sy hurts the paternalistic approach of institutions to know better than the creators themselves, most of whom still live.

How to pass on the inheritance?

Three works of art by El Hadji Sy from the World Heritage Museum and the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, which Ken would have liked to exhibit, could not travel to Berlin for cost, time and various other reasons. Because the originals were not available, SY chose reproductions, even if the image data delivered by the museum are not particularly good.

In the wall text she describes how she found two of the paintings in the Iwalewahaus: without information, without a label. Only through her father’s signature could identify his works through the brush stroke and dynamic rhythm. Even in the form of this small reproduced section, the pictures refused to be quiet, so their text.

She does not deal with the pure return of the works, says Sy. She wants to give people in Senegal the opportunity to recapture their history and quotes the Senegalese restitution expert Felwine Sarr. When returning, “re-socialization” is also an important aspect for him.

“What happens to the works, how do you take your role on the continent? Sys creative exhibition is a learning location, library, video room and lounge. Due to the liveliness of the representation, she encounters the viewer of what she lacks in German museology: to keep a “legacy in motion”.