Mor Faye Retrospective at the World Bank Art Program. Bara Diokhané





 The night before his death in Dakar in November 1984, Mor Faye had been drawing with total immediacy on cheap floating fabric the portrait of a mysterious beauty. This is the same fabric with which Muslims wrap corpses in Senegal before burial. As if he were expecting or wishing the event, he drew on the cotton sheet his essential tools: a brush and palette. This last work was found under the pillow upon which he enjoyed his last sleep. He was thirty seven- years old.
In 1990 I was entrusted by the estate of Mor Faye with the assignment to set up a retrospective exhibition. Many artists, among them Elhadj Sy, Saidu Barry, Issa Samb of the Laboratoire Agit-Art, Ibou Diouf, devoted their time to helping with the concept, selection and installation of the exhibition. A highlight of the exhibition was the display of a stunning series from 1982 about Apartheid, long before it became the international concern that mobilized many great artists.
The Mor Faye first retrospective of January-February 1991, hosted by Dakar’s Galerie 39, became a landmark, not only because of the celebration of a fresh and powerful secret art it revealed, or of the instant myth his life became, but also of the indication of new paradigms and directions that the art world in Senegal- trapped by the stress caused by the demise of the official Negritude philosophy and esthetics, championed by former President and poet Leopold Sedar Senghor- for its own definition and rebirth.
There is a dilemma in which some critics attempt to confine any contemporary and universal artistic proposition from Africa. They feel that, to be “authentic”, African artists must reproduce only masks, wildlife, and village scenes, otherwise they would only reproduce weaker renditions of Western masters. Unable to challenge the power the masks, or the accomplishments of European artists, a contemporary art from Africa appears to them to be irrelevant. In the art of Mor Faye we find an antidote and an unspoken challenge to sucht prejudiced critics.
Mor Faye invites us on a cosmic journey in which many grand mistrials are his astral companions and delivers the message of a secret master in exile. His work remains a strong statement and proposition of emotion, freedom and openness, an endless searching, which is the purpose of all art and science. The absolute tool of time, through which he has been able to make openings, has been his best companion in crossing the centuries of human experience and in building a memory for the future. The art of Mor Faye is a valuable contribution to the global art experience that ushers in the twenty first century.

Bara Diokhané


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