“This scene is alive”: Abidjan Art Week showcases the city as a growing cultural hub | Cote d’Ivoire

On a recent weekday evening, the doors of more than a dozen galleries and museums across Abidjan remained open until midnight, several hours later than usual, as art lovers wandered around the city on a bus tour. It was the Night of Exhibitions, designed for people to come after work and enjoy Abidjan Art Week to the fullest.

The after-hours special was first tested in January 2024 on the sidelines of the Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament hosted and won by Côte d’Ivoire. This tradition continued this year during the third session of Art Week, which lasted from last Tuesday to Sunday.

Since its launch, Abidjan Art Week has diversified its locations to include different parts of the city, such as La Rotonde Arts Center for Contemporary Arts in the high-rise Plateau administrative district and the Adama Tongara Museum of Contemporary Cultures (MuCAT) in the working-class Apopo neighbourhood.

“It’s about creating opportunities to learn about art outside specific occasions, and promoting the idea of ​​visiting not just to buy but to immerse yourself in the artist’s world,” said Art Week spokeswoman Marie-Hélène Banimbadio Tusyama.

After two civil wars stifled Côte d’Ivoire in the 2000s and 2000s, the economic capital of French-speaking West Africa lays claim to being at the heart of West Africa’s contemporary art scene alongside Dakar, the default reference point for the region’s visual arts.

In Abidjan, home to many immigrants from within and outside Africa, a group of local art collectors is on the rise. Since 2022, MuCAT has hosted the African Image Gallery, and the Marché des Arts du Spectacle d’Abidjan – Abidjan’s answer to the Dakar Biennale – Its 14th edition is due later this month.

A nationwide graffiti festival was created two years ago, a symbolic turn in a country where graffiti art was previously associated with vandalism and artists faced the risk of criminal prosecution. Today, colorful murals line the exterior walls of La Pyramide and many of the luxury hotels in the Plateau area.

Organizers of the art week say they hope to see sustainable growth of the local art scene and have a goal to take it to new heights “independent of external approval”. In this edition, artists from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mali were among those who exhibited their works across the city, and the number of participating galleries doubled.

The event’s founder, Yacouba Konaté, who is also director of La Rotonde des Arts, says its aim is to engage as many audience members as possible, alluding to the perception that enjoying art is an entirely elitist activity.

“We want this event to become increasingly visible and available to a wide audience,” he added. “One of the things we are trying to do is communicate to let people know that Abidjan is a cultural city and that there is a visual arts scene in Côte d’Ivoire and that scene is alive.”

This year, the week opened with a tribute to Simone Gerando Ndiaye, one of Côte d’Ivoire’s first art historians and a pioneer of the gallery spaces that gave the scene its first institutional roots. She and her daughter Ghazal now run Galerie Louis-Simon Girandeau, one of this year’s participating venues.

At MuCAT, the Murmures d’Archives exhibition presented a different register of quieter, more archival art. There he ended the week with an artists’ workshop and a DJ set.

In upscale Cocody, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Ouattara Watts at Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, one of the city’s most prominent venues, brought the Ivorian diaspora into dialogue with the local scene. The artist said the work was inspired by seeing art as universal.

Watts, who moved to New York in 1988 on the advice of his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, said: “My vision is not linked to any particular country or continent. It transcends borders and everything that can be found on the map.” “While I use recognizable elements to make myself better understood, this project goes much further than that. It is the universe I am drawing.”