El Hadji Sy

No. 13 Esprit de l’Univers

El Hadji Sy is an important figure in the critical movement that followed Lépold Sedar Senghor´s Négritude ideology. Senghor supported El Hadji’s work from the start and continued to follow it, but they came together again in another cultural policy initiative, inaugurated by Senghor: the famous Villages des Arts. The village is a co-operative for artists in Dakar where each one has a professional studio. It is one of the city’s major tourist attractions but is also a space that maintains its environment as a working and creative venue for local and visiting international artists. Born in Senegal in 1954, El Hadji Sy (El Sy) studied fine arts at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar. A widely exhibited artist and curator, he works contemporary Senegalese art, both in Africa and Europe; including an Anthology of Senegalese Contemporary Art, co-edited with Friedrich Axt and a collection of works for the Museum für Völkerkunde, Frankfurt am Main, in 1989. He was President of the Association of Visual Arts of Senegal (ANAPS) in Dakar for several years, and has organized a number of exhibitions and initiatives, including the Village des Arts and the Laboratoire Agit-Art. The latter is an artist collective founded in 1974 in Dakar, Senegal, aimed at agitating existing institutional frameworks, to question the tenets of Leopold Sedar Sengor’s Négritude and to encourage artists to adopt critical approaches toward their practices. At that time, Dakar was a place where political consciousness was actively articulated, and artist collectives like Laboratoire Agit-Art went beyond aesthetic experience to critically promote the development of cultural and artistic endeavors.