80-90, Deviation

80-90, Deviation 

Issa Samb, El Hadji Sy & Kan-Si 

November 6th, 2026– March 27th, 2027

Opening November 18, 2026 6pm-9pm

Alongside the 16th Dakar Biennale, 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—most of which cannot be precisely dated—emerge from this same heterogeneity of materials and supports.

Samb’s works bear the traces of this perpetually shifting place, of its successive transformations, and of those who passed through it, as they have lived alongside the artist for many years. They also embody the political concerns of the time, the artist's spiritual and philosophical thoughts, and his daily gestures, which amounted to a form of continuous performance.

One work in particular resembles a collage formed through successive accumulations: newspaper, shimmering aluminum foil, book pages, cardboard, industrial paint, and other elements are incorporated onto its surface. Other, more figurative, works are composed of threads and knots acting as connecting links between figures and, more broadly, between individuals and peoples. Sewing recurs in several works—including “La Marche du Peuple” (The People’s March), 1996—also attests to a practice shaped by exchange and collaboration, notably with the artist Alioune Diouf, who lived, assisted, and worked alongside Issa Samb for over thirty years.

1.  Joe Ouakam is Issa Samb’s pseudonym, Ouakam being  the Lébou neighborhood where he was born.
   

El Hadji Sy

Throughout his career, El Hadji Sy 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.

At once close to Senghor and dissident toward his cultural policy, Sy developed a pictorial language characterized by large, brightly colored spirals, plant-like volutes, and organic forms that, at times, conjure human presence in motion. He has used a multitude of unconventional supports, such as kites, flags, transport bags, screens, mirrors, or glass, conceiving his works as theatrical objects:mobile and transportable, like a travelling “circus,” able to fold and unfold upon itself. In what Philippe Pirotte has described as a “provocative gesture”, against the Western tradition of easel painting taught at the École des 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.

From the mid-1980s and onward, El Hadji Sy began using jute rice sacks as a support. Typically used to transport everyday consumer goods, the sacks were unstitched, flattened, sewn together, and invested with his undulating forms. By linking painting through the material itself to commodity circuits, he situated it both in the daily lives of Senegalese people and in broader globalized systems of circulation, exchange, and consumption. Through his choice of this ordinary material, these works remain deeply rooted in Senegal’s economic realities, at a time of profound economic decline, placing the conditions under which art is produced at the centre of artistic inquiry. 

Like banners, the works are suspended from bars, freed from the rigidity of the stretchers and frames. This choice is an irreverent response to the manufactures of Thiès and the tradition of tapestries commissioned and supported by the State, challenging both the logic of official patronage and their decorative, prestigious character. In place of  monumentality and fixity, Sy proposes works that are flexible and mobile: suspended, foldable, transportable, and capable of being installed elsewhere.

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. Kan-Si translated this feeling of imbalance and fragmentation into pictorial form through his series “Déstructurées”, which he exhibited alongside poems at Galerie 39 in 1992.

Assemblages of wood, canvas, and cardboard, the works fracture the pictorial surface and dismember the rectangular shape of the traditional frame. Through an interplay of voids and solids, geometric forms, and nested perspectives, these create a spatial disorientation that echoes the social, political, and economic instability Senegal was experiencing at the time. Slanted pieces of wood or bamboo split the canvases, while oval cutouts expose either empty space or fragments of corrugated cardboards.. Sometimes built up in multiple layers, the surface is occasionally incised with geometric shapes that repeat, shift, and respond to one another from different angles across the pictorial plane. These dislocated paintings may also evoke barricades or small structures like doors or windows, granting this formal deconstruction an urban resonance.

At the same time, the colors are drawn from the artist's immediate environment: the ochre and earth tones of certain works, the celestial blues of others, situated these formal experiments within the landscape in which they originate. The painted surfaces offer glimpses of abstract forms, where the elusive silhouette of a body seems to appear, only to later disappear into the vacant space created within the work, as in “Déstructuré I” (1996). Kan-Si’s work is thus constructed as much through its openings, reliefs, and forms as through what it refuses to reveal.

© Text copyright: Jennifer Houdrouge