Ken Aïcha Sy: Survival Kit

Ken Aïcha Sy, Survival Kit: Between Us and History: The Hidden Archive 
What do we do with memory when it is no longer ours to touch, when it has been archived elsewhere—fragmented, displaced, and inaccessible? Survival Kit: Between Us and History: The Hidden Archive is a curatorial project born from this question. It investigates the history of contemporary Senegalese painting from the 1960s to the 1990s through the lens of personal and family archives while engaging with broader issues of heritage, restitution, and the politics of memory.

This journey began in Dakar in 2019, following the death of my mother, Anne Jean Bart—a journalist and cultural activist. As I explored her personal archives, including articles published in Le Soleil, I uncovered a dense narrative of the Senegalese art scene told from within. Her perspective offered not only a window into this world, but also into the artistic and political context that shaped it. Parallel to this, my father's legacy—El Hadji Sy, a painter, scenographer, and pivotal figure in post-independence art movements—appeared as a guiding thread.

My research traced the emergence of artistic collectives in Senegal, particularly those from the 1980s who sought to break away from the aesthetic norms and ideological frameworks promoted under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s cultural policies. These artists, including my father, challenged state-sponsored art with new forms of expression rooted in experimentation, resistance, and a desire for autonomy.

The project expanded beyond Senegal thanks to the Turn2 programme, which enabled me to follow in my father’s footsteps across Germany and the Middle East. I consulted archives in Frankfurt, where he had exhibited, and later in Bayreuth. I also accessed institutional records from the Venice Biennale and London’s Africa 95, where the presence of Senegalese artists was both groundbreaking and under-documented.

These experiences revealed an unsettling reality: much of Senegal’s contemporary art history is preserved in European archives—scattered across museum basements, forgotten in institutional folders, or confined to inaccessible repositories. This displacement underscores broader questions: Who writes history? Who controls the archive? Which stories remain excluded, and why?

Survival Kit is an attempt to reclaim these silenced or scattered narratives. It is personal, political, and curatorial all at once. Rather than seeking to reconstruct a linear history, it embraces its gaps, tensions, and multiplicities. It considers the archive not as a static deposit but as a living tool for resistance, continuity, and transmission.

The title Survival Kit reflects this ethos. It suggests a set of tools—emotional, intellectual, artistic—for navigating inherited stories, interrupted lineages, and historical ruptures. It also alludes to strategies of resilience developed by artists working under or against dominant cultural systems. What they left behind—letters, manifestos, photographs, exhibition catalogues—is not only material evidence but a testimony to their vision and courage.

In this light, the exhibition raises critical questions in today’s debates on restitution and decolonization: How do we ensure access to these fragmented memories? What does it mean to restore not only objects but the right to narrate? Why do certain stories remain confined in foreign institutions, and whose interests does this serve?

The work of Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr resonates deeply here. As he writes, “Restitution is not only about repairing a historical injustice. It is part of a broader process: reconciling with oneself, rebuilding a peaceful relationship with the world, and restoring interrupted trajectories.” His words underline the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of returning what was taken—not only physically, but epistemically.

Opening at ifa-Galerie Berlin in June 2025, before traveling to ifa-Galerie Stuttgart in October, Survival Kit initiates a transnational dialogue on African archives and artistic heritage. It calls on institutions to reflect on their role not only as keepers of memory, but as enablers of return, recognition, and repair.

Ultimately, this exhibition is not just about Senegalese art. It is also about the ways in which heritage circulates, disappears, and re-emerges. It is about how artists and their descendants continue to claim space within the global art historical narrative. And it is a reminder that archives, when activated with care and intention, can shape the future—not just document the past.

Under the patronage of UNESCO. This exhibition is organized in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

Exhibition opening: June 19, 2025, 7pm
ifa-Galerie, Linienstr. 139/140 10110 Berlin

Public program: June 20, 2025, 11am–5:30pm
Heckmann-Höfe (entry via Oranienburger Str. 32 or Auguststr. 9) Panel discussion, Presentation, Workshop & Performance with: Clémentine Deliss, Anna Helfer & Students of the Freie Universität Berlin, Elsa M’Bala aka A.M.E.T. and Dior Thiam. Lunch break with Senegalese cuisine by Ndeye Ndack Sarr