80-90, Deviation

Selebe Yoon presents 80-90, Deviation, a group exhibition bringing together historical works created during the 1980s and 1990s by Senegalese artists Issa Samb (1945–2017), El Hadji Sy (b.1954), and Amadou Kan-Si (b.1961).

Belonging to three different generations, each of them asserted, in his own way, an aesthetics of rupture at the end of the 20th century, while simultaneously redefining the artist’s place and social function through various collective initiatives, including the Laboratoire Agit’Art (1974), the Village des Arts (1977), Tenq (1980), and the Huit Facettes collective (1996), deployed on both a local and international scale.

Painting with their feet or hands, piercing the surface of the canvas, allowing works to evolve through continual exposure to natural elements and the city, freeing oneself from the frame: all three artists experimented with a wide range of materials and gestures, turning painting into a true space of action. From the 1970s onwards, the elders, Samb and Sy, opposed both the cultural ideology of Négritude championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor and the formalism of the École de Dakar. Upon graduating from the Beaux-Arts de Dakar in 1991, Kan-Si affirmed the need for artists to self-organize and create their own frameworks for action. At different moments, each artist thus restored art’s social resonances, its entanglement with local realities, and its power to provoke political upheaval.

Issa Samb
A philosopher, theater practitioner, artist, and poet, Issa Samb (also known as Joe Ouakam) is inseparable from his courtyard-studio located at 17 Rue Jules Ferry in downtown Dakar, where he lived and worked for nearly fifty years. Starting in the 1970s, his courtyard became a place of gathering, political thought, and artistic experimentation. Crosses, canvases, swaddled figures, pieces of wood, tree leaves, clothing, various furniture, sculptures, and found objects were continuously moved, altered, and recomposed within it. The works brought together in this exhibition emerge from this same heterogeneity of materials and supports.

El Hadji Sy
Throughout his career, El Hadji Sy, at once close to Senghor and dissident toward his cultural policy, has combined political activism with artistic and curatorial practice. As a head of the painting and costume workshop within the Laboratoire Agit’Art, he was also responsible for the collective’s visual dramaturgy. He has used a multitude of unconventional supports, such as kites, flags, transport bags or mirrors conceiving his works as theatrical objects: mobile and transportable, like a travelling “circus,” able to fold and unfold. In what Philippe Pirotte has described as a “provocative gesture”, against the Western tradition of easel painting taught at the Beaux-Arts in Dakar, Sy’s early works were born from the act of walking, stomping, and dancing with bright colors across the canvases or sheets of cardboard placed directly on the floor. In this way, he restored painting's performative function by imprinting traces of his body onto surfaces. Like an actor entering the stage, he produces what he calls an entrée en peinture (“entry into painting”) in which the traces of the artist’s body disrupt the institutional body.

Amadou Kan-Si
From his participation in Tenq in 1994 and 1996─workshops bringing together Senegalese and international artists─to the creation of Huit Facettes in rural areas in 1996, Kan-Si became involved early on in collective experiments aimed at imagining and actively testing new working frameworks for artists—an approach he continues to pursue today. Upon graduating from the Beaux-Arts in 1991, he observed a social fabric thrown out of balance, subjected to new forms of precarity and restructuring whose effects he questioned within the postcolonial context. These concerns emerged in an era in Senegal marked by the social consequences of structural adjustment policies initiated in the 1980s under the presidency of Abdou Diouf, notably with the intervention of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.