DAKAR.- Organized by the Fondation pour le Développement de la Culture Contemporaine Africaine, the second stage of “Prête-moi Ton Rêve“ is taking place until 28 January 2020 at the Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar, after its first stage was held in Casablanca in June 2019.

The exhibition has gathered more than fifty artworks from 28 celebrated African artists, including Abdoulaye Konaté, William Kentridge, Chéri Samba, Barthélémy Toguo, Jane Alexander, Ouattara Watts, Soly Cissé, and Nnenna Okoré.

For the Dakar stage, the exhibition welcomes the addition of Bernie Searle (South Africa), Angèle Etoundi (Cameroon) and Rui Assubuji (Mozambique) to the list.

The core show has been curated by Yacouba Konaté and Brahim Alaoui, alongside the scientific committee of the Musée des Civilisations Noires. In parallel to the main exhibition, the museum is hosting a tribute exhibition dedicated to the Henry Barbier Collection. Named “Fent Bokk“, the Carte Blanche exhibition has been entrusted to young curator El Hadji Malick Ndiaye at the Théodore Monod museum in Dakar.

The exhibition will run until 28 January 2020, before embarking on its next stopovers across the African continent.

CURATORS OF THE EXHIBITION

YACOUBA KONATÉ General Commissioner
The philosopher, art critic and academic Yacouba Konaté was born in 1953 in Katiola (Ivory Coast) and today, he lives and works in Abidjan, where he is the managing director of MASA (the Abidjan Performing Arts Market).

He holds a doctorate from Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne University and teaches philosophy at Abidjan-Cocody University. He is a regular guest speaker at several prestigious universities such as Stanford University in California, Laval University in Quebec, as well as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Sciences Po (CERI) in Paris.

He is a member of the scientific council of the Académie des Sciences, de la Culture et des Arts d’Afrique et des Diasporas (Academy of Sciences, Culture and Arts of Africa and the Diasporas) and was in charge of Fondation JeanPaul Blachère’s African office. Yacouba Konaté has written numerous books on African personalities, notably the musician Alpha Blondy and sculptor Christian Lattier.

He has curated the Dakar Biennial several times and is one of contemporary African art’s great thinkers. His name features on the European Union and the African Union’s lists of cultural development consultants. Recognised by his peers, he was nominated chairman of the board of directors of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in 2008.

BRAHIM ALAOUI Artistic curator
Brahim Alaoui is a Moroccan art historian and exhibition curator.
He started his career as a researcher at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and was head of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris for more than twenty years, where he organised several major exhibitions between 1985 and 2007.

He has written numerous books and catalogues, notably on contemporary Arabic artists and is one of the rare thinkers to establish connections - both in his texts and the exhibitions he has organised - between the art of the Arab world and the European and international art scene.

He has been a member of various juries including the Venice Biennale in 1999 (UNESCO Prize) and the Shanghai Biennale in 2001 (UNESCO Prize) and is a former member of UNESCO’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art, as well as the International Council of Museums (ICOM). He now shares his time between cultural consulting, writing and curating exhibitions.