PARIS.- From October 24 to 26, 2025, under the glass roof of the Carreau du Temple in Paris, this anniversary edition will be a major highlight of the Paris Art Week, bringing together collectors, professionals, and contemporary art enthusiasts.
Since its creation, AKAA has established itself as the leading art fair in France dedicated to the artistic expressions of the African continent and its diasporas. Each year, the event offers an exceptional platform for the artists and galleries shaping the contemporary art landscape. For this special edition, a carefully curated selection of exhibitors will showcase the diversity and vitality of these artistic scenes.
This year, AKAA welcomes its new Artistic Director, Sitor Senghor, whose curatorial vision will enrich the dialogue between artists, gallerists, and collectors.
This new direction promises a stimulating program designed to explore current artistic dynamics and renew the perspective on African and Afro-descendant art scenes.
AKAA offers a rich program of talks, performances, screenings, and debates through
Les Rencontres AKAA, a vital cultural platform at the heart of the fair, Artists, thinkers, and key players in the art market will be invited to engage in discussions on the major issues in the sphere of contemporary African creation and its place within the international art market.
Through this edition, AKAA not only aims to celebrate its ten-year anniversary but also to reaffirm its commitment to the future of African and Afro-descendant art scenes. Building on its history and international network, AKAA continues to be a space for encounters, discoveries, and opportunities for artists and art professionals.
A new Artistic Direction with Sitor Senghor
Longtime collector throughout his countless years in international investment banking, thereafter advisor and independent curator, he upholds with dedication a family tradition for supporting African art with the strong belief that the market will respond firmly to such a variety of talented yet less well-known contemporary masters. Having participated in international shows and fairs in Abidjan, London, Marrakech, New York, Paris, Rome, Venice... Senghor has exhibited and helped promote the careers of several artists of the African scene such as Nu Barreto, Aliou Diack, Ernest Dükü, Ouattara Watts…
Director of the Parisian gallery Orbis pictus until 2024, a space for numerous intercultural dialogues beyond the boundaries of modern and contemporary art, Senghor has also curated the exhibition Antoni Clavé, The Spirit of the Warrior, at the Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, during the 2022 biennale, and in 2023 at the Fondation Donwahi in Abidjan. Most recently he has been the Artistic Director of the exhibit Lee Miller, Saint-Malo under siege, August 1944, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Saint-Malo.
THE CURATORIAL VISION
CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION, AFRICA HAS BEEN A LAND OF REVELATIONS SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME.
It was there, in silent valleys and canyons, that the hand of man carved the first rock frescoes where flint, blood, and ash blended with rock to create the world’s first colors; spiritual and ritual colors those of a people who painted not to adorn, but to speak, invoke, and convey. In this original alchemy, the four elements merge and create materiality, the fifth element.
Africa has given the world a vision, a voice, a memory. It has entrusted its artists, past and present, with the sacred mission of being intercessors between the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the origin and the future. The poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor said that the African artist does not create to please, but to pay tribute to the mystery. Thus, in each mask, each sculpture, each dance or polyrhythm, it is the Black soul that speaks, vibrant, generous, universal.
Today, more than ever, Africa glows. Its legacy can be found in the visual arts, music, fashion and gastronomy. It is inspiring, often imitated, sometimes distorted, too often plundered, but never erased. It resists and renews itself, because Africa is not a nostalgia: it is a creative impulse. It is essential because its truth is universal.
It is in this spirit of rebirth, of rediscovered pride, that the tenth edition of AKAA holds, a new beginning rooted in materiality as the raw language of man facing reality. Here, materiality becomes the language of emotion, a link between continents, a tool for reconciliation between the hand and the mind. It restores the artist’s gesture to its primary nobility: that of shaping the world, not as a master, but as a servant of beauty. Through it, the African hand often despised, but never subjugated, rediscovers its full creative power.
AKAA 2025 will be a journey, a quest, an invitation. We will walk in the footsteps of visionary artists, those who understood art as an act of freedom, a resistance through beauty, a celebration of life.
