Abidjan Art Week Doubles Galleries, Stays Open to Midnight — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Night of the Galleries kept more than a dozen Abidjan galleries and museums open until midnight on a weekday, with art enthusiasts touring the city by bus — an after-hours format first tested in January 2024 on the sidelines of the Africa Cup of Nations.
- The third edition of Abidjan art week saw the number of participating galleries more than double and featured artists from Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mali, with venues spread from the Plateau district's La Rotonde des Arts to the working-class Abobo neighbourhood's MuCAT.
- Founder Yacouba Konaté, who also directs La Rotonde des Arts, said accessibility is a deliberate goal, telling organizers the event should become "increasingly visible and accessible to a broad public" — a stated counter to the perception that enjoying art is "a strictly elite activity."
- Abidjan is positioning itself alongside Dakar as francophone West Africa's contemporary art capital, with the Marché des Arts du Spectacle d'Abidjan — billed as the city's answer to the Dakar Biennale — holding its 14th edition later this month and MuCAT hosting the Africa Foto Fair since 2022.
- The week opened with a tribute to Simone Guirandou-N'Diaye, one of Côte d'Ivoire's earliest art historians, whose family-run Galerie LouiSimone Guirandou was among the participating venues and helped give the local scene its first institutional roots.
- New York-based Ouattara Watts — who moved there in 1988 on the advice of his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat — mounted a solo show at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in upmarket Cocody, saying his work is inspired by a vision that "transcends borders."
- A nationwide graffiti festival instituted two years ago has helped rebrand murals across the Plateau district, a symbolic U-turn in a country where graffiti art was previously associated with vandalism and carried the risk of criminal prosecution.
Why it matters: Abidjan's art infrastructure — the 14th-edition Marché des Arts du Spectacle, MuCAT's Africa Foto Fair, a now-legitimized graffiti festival, and an art week that doubled its gallery count in one edition — is building the institutional base to shift curatorial and commercial gravity in West Africa away from default-hub Dakar. Organizers' stated goal of scaling the scene "independently of external approval" signals they are betting a rising local collector base and diaspora demand can sustain it.
Ask SkimNews
