Ken Aïcha Sy: Survival Kit

Grief often forces us to return to the traces left behind by those we have lost. In my case, it meant delving into the archives of my mother, Anne Jeanbart, a Franco-Caribbean journalist who chronicled Senegal’s cultural scene for decades. In the vibrant Dakar of the 1980s, she wrote about the artists, thinkers, and movements that defined an era when the city shone with extraordinary creative energy. Her writings became my first archive—intimate, fragile, yet revelatory. They opened up an entire chapter of Senegal’s contemporary history for me, while also prompting deeper questions about memory, identity, and inheritance.

This personal archive became the foundation for a curatorial research journey where mourning, the search for a father figure, and the desire to understand my country’s history converged. Out of this exploration emerged Survival Kit—an evolving project that operates as both a tool and an archive, designed to serve the next generation. It is a way of saving time, of opening paths, of recognizing and valuing a heritage that is both ours and universal: the artistic legacy of Senegal.

After previous presentations in Saint-Louis, Dakar, and Berlin, I now bring this chapter of Survival Kit to Stuttgart. Here, the project takes on a contextual dimension: it revisits the structural framework established by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegal’s poet-president, who envisioned art as a force for development, emancipation, and national identity. This exhibition is not simply a display of artworks. It is a window into the post-independence period — a time when modernism in Senegal sought to forge a visual language equal to the aspirations of a newly sovereign nation.

This iteration focuses on the pioneers of the École de Dakar, a generation of artists whose work shaped Senegalese modernism. Their names are too many to exhaust here, but each left a mark: Amadou Ba, Seni Awa Camara, Mor Faye, Younousse Sèye, Souleymane Keita, Ousmane Wade, Chérif Thiam, and so many others. Their works, often forgotten or confined to museum storage for decades, carry the memory of a moment when aesthetics, politics, and identity were deeply intertwined.

By bringing these works back into circulation, the exhibition seeks to restore visibility to a narrative too often overlooked. Senegal’s modernists were not the first—creativity existed long before them in the hands of artisans, griots, and ancestors—but they were the ones who, in the aftermath of independence, redefined the relationship between tradition, modernity, and sovereignty. They experimented with form and language, sometimes aligning with the ideals of Négritude, sometimes breaking away from it. In doing so, they affirmed the possibility of an art that could speak directly to the people while engaging with the global currents of modernism.

As philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne reminds us in En quête d’Afrique(s): “Memory is a living force: it does not simply preserve the past, it reinvents it to illuminate the future.” This insight resonates at the heart of Survival Kit. The project does not aim to freeze history, but to reactivate it—to show how archives can serve as living tools, how memory can become a resource for reinvention.

My motivation is also personal. I wanted to see these works, to confront them directly, to feel their weight and their beauty. I wanted to share them with curious audiences, but also with my peers in Senegal and beyond, to say: look. These are not relics, but powerful, exceptional, visionary works. They belong not only to history, but also to our present.

Survival Kit is not a singular answer, nor is it the voice of one generation. It is a plural narrative, woven from multiple perspectives—scholars, artists, cultural actors, and institutions across Senegal, Germany, and elsewhere. Each contributes a nuance, a fragment, a memory. Together, they form a living archive that challenges our institutions, interrogates our narratives, and reimagines our futures.

This exhibition is both personal and collective. It is anchored in Senegal’s history but oriented toward a universal tomorrow. More than a presentation, it is an act of restitution: a way of returning to circulation a vital chapter of Senegalese and African art history, one that deserves recognition not as a marginal note, but as an essential part of global modernism.

By reopening these archives, we are not only preserving memory—we are creating the conditions for it to live, to inspire, and to guide us into the future.

Curator: Ken Aïcha Sy

Under the patronage of UNESCO. 

Exhibition opening: October 31, 2025, 7pm
ifa-Galerie, Charlottenplatz 17 70173 Stuttgart

Event: November 1, 2025, 2–6pm
Talks by Anna Helfer and Philipp Horn / Listening Session with fluctuating images (Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund).

The exhibition is accompanied by a multifaceted program of lectures, film screenings, performances, and workshops.