El Hadj Sy (El Hadj Moussa Babacar Sy) is a well-known Senegalese artist, curator, and cultural activist. He stands out not only as a painter, but also as a performance artist and the founder of numerous artist-led workshops, collectives, and studio spaces in Senegal. For the past forty years Sy has regularly challenged state authority in the interests of asserting his artistic autonomy and that of his peers. In 1977 he occupied an unused army base where he and others established what was to be the first version of the Village des Arts. As Deliss describes this venture in her introduction to this volume, it brought together some seventy actors, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists. A few years later he established Tenq (which means “articulation” in Wolof), a project space that hosted international workshops in Dakar and St. Louis. He was also a leader in the Laboratoirè AGIT’ART, an artistic collective where he supervised visual staging and costuming.
Sy is known not only as a cultural activist, but also as an acclaimed contemporary painter. His works, as noted by Philippe Pirotte in his essay “Dancing in and out of Painting,” introduces a choreographic process into painting. Sy also steps outside of the museum and gallery spaces into social environments with large-format works composed of a variety of materials including discarded rice and sugar sacs.
In 1985 Sy was selected by the then Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Weltkulturen Museum) in Frankfurt, Germany, to work with Friedrich Axt, a German linguist and art patron, to assemble a collection of Senegalese art. One of the results of this effort was a trilingual anthology about art creation in Senegal. Titled Anthology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal (1989), with a preface by Léopold Sédar Senghor, it has served, since its publication, as an important reference work about postindependence Senegalese artists from a diversity of domains including ceramics, sculpture, print-making, painting, and tapestry design.
Sy’s relationship with the museum was strengthened in 2010 when he lent sixty of his paintings to it. They had previously been in the care of Axt, an arrangement made necessary by Senegal’s eviction of Sy and fellow artists in 1983 from the first Village des Arts. In 2014 Sy was a guest curator at the museum, during which time he brought forward contemporary Senegalese art he himself had collected thirty years before. This installation presented art from the ethnographic cannon alongside the works of contemporary artists to create a public dialogue in which the works are not only in conversation with one another but also speaking in a merged voice to viewers.
This volume is, in effect, the catalogue for an exhibition of Sy’s artistic work, including archival documentation of his varied roles as painter, cultural activist, and curator. It is unique in that it presents an in-depth historical survey on the multidimensionality of a leading African artist, as well as insights into his conceptual and aesthetic frameworks as they changed over the thirty-year period under discussion. The several essays and conversations, presented in both English and German, provide a valuable added dimension to this artistic retrospective. They cover not only the changes that occurred in his style and subject matter, but also a life history suffused with artistic and cultural activism. An innovator not only in style but also in substrates used for his artistic creations, Sy stands out against the canvas of any age. His artistic, social, and cultural activism, his ability to harmonize the performative arts with paintings, and his seamless integration of canonical art objects from earlier traditions with contemporary art have taken him even further, earning him an iconic place in art history.
The exhibition for which this volume was the catalogue was co-curated by Sy and by Philippe Pirotte, a Belgian art historian who is the dean of the Städelschule school of art in Frankfurt. The exhibition included some of Sy’s most unusual paintings and installations such as those produced on industrial rice and sugar sacs or synthetic kite silk. Also included were paintings that Sy created with his bare feet. Artworks by several of Sy’s Senegalese colleagues were also exhibited.
El Hadj Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics is a beautifully produced volume. Its visual and bilingual textual content reflect meticulous research, scholarship, and attention to detail. It will greatly appeal to a broad audience of those interested in the arts of Africa.
