Dakar’s elegantly dilapidated Ancien Palais de Justice hosts the Dak’Art Biennale for the second time. Inaugurated in 1958, the courthouse was closed to juridical business in 1992—coincidentally the year that Dak’Art was established. Officially signed over to Senegal’s Culture Ministry in 2017, the Old Courthouse is an architectural dream for art, with a cavernous central hall featuring an enormous open-air atrium presided over by a stately mango tree. In “The Red Hour”—curator Simon Njami’s second edition of Dak’Art—the mango tree literally anchors the exhibition, with the floating shutters of Pascale Monnin’s Elevation Matthew (2016) tethered about its waist. Long strings hung with shutters painted blue spin out from the tree to form a suspended roof above the courtyard. These wooden window and door parts were salvaged from the artist’s home in Haiti, which was destroyed by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. When shown in Dakar, Elevation Matthew extends beyond its Haitian origins to summon the devastations that have globally constituted the African diaspora—both historically, through slavery, and in the present day, via the direct and indirect forces of exodus. Offering a shared canopy beneath which disparate works are displayed, Elevation Matthew’s gesture of encompassment and inclusion reflects the curatorial approach of …