Conversation with Aude Tournaye
Event date: November 21st, 2026 at 3pm
Central figures in the Laboratoire Agit’Art, Issa Samb and El Hadji Sy were part of a generation of artists who challenged established distinctions between theatre, visual art, and everyday life in post-independence Dakar. Bringing together artists, writers, actors, and filmmakers, the collective experimented with performance, improvisation, and play as ways of rethinking the relationship between artworks, their meanings, and their publics.
Taking Selebe Yoon’s exhibition 80–90, Déviation as its point of departure, this conversation explores the theatrical and performative practices that informed the work of Samb and Sy, but are not always immediately visible in the objects that remain. Drawing on archival texts, photographs, press accounts, and audiovisual recordings, researcher and curator Aude Tournaye will trace how the Laboratoire transformed gestures into languages, artworks into sites of encounter, and spectators into potential participants in the production of meaning.
But how do we write the history of practices that resisted fixed forms? And what if performance itself could be understood as an archive—not simply an event that disappears, but a means through which gestures, knowledge, and histories are carried, transformed, and transmitted?
Rather than offering a definitive historical account, the presentation will open onto a collective conversation, inviting memories, questions, and differing perspectives from those present. Bringing archival fragments into dialogue with lived experience, the evening asks not only how we might reconstruct the Laboratoire’s history, but how its experiments might continue to challenge the ways we encounter, interpret, and participate in art today.
Aude Tournaye
Aude Tournaye is a researcher, curator, and interdisciplinary practitioner. A PhD candidate at Columbia University (New York), her research explores collective artistic practices and the intersections of art, politics, and everyday life in postcolonial Senegal. Her dissertation focuses particularly on Laboratoire Agit’Art, its theatrical and performative experiments, and the forms of collective thought and action that emerged through them. Alongside her academic research, she develops a collaborative curatorial practice at the intersection of art, architecture, and research, notably through her work with Picha and the Lubumbashi Biennale, as well as various artistic projects in Belgium and internationally.
Photo: Younes Baba-Ali