La sélection de / Cheikh Ndiaye: Musique, cinéma, lectures et autres références culturelles

16 - 23 April 2020

In the section ‘The selection of’ the artists take the floor and bring us into their universe, sharing the works, films, books and music that have left their mark on their imaginations.

This week, discover the universe of Cheikh Ndiaye.

Know more about the artist
Artworks
Samba Diambaré Samb
1924 - 2019

"To immerse yourself in traditional Senegalese music." CN

Samba Diambaré Samb (1924 - 2019) was one of the last great African griots, elevated to the dignity of Living Human Treasure of Senegal by UNESCO in 2006. He contributed a lot to the valorisation and popularisation of Senegalese lyrical and classical music.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Cinema Corona, 2018
Cheikh Ndiaye
Installation, La Maréchalerie, Versailles, 2017
Artworks
Ousmane Sembène
Les bouts de bois de Dieu, 1960
"Sembène Ousmane is for me a major figure in literature. His novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu is set during the railway workers' strike of the " Dakar-Niger ". The novel goes back to the emergence of a social consciousness within the African working class, a consciousness that will contribute to Independence. Les Bouts de bois de Dieu is also for me a novel about heroism and in particular the heroism of women."

Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007) is a major Senegalese writer, director, actor and screenwriter on the african contemporary scene and in the world, known for his militant bias on political and social issues.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Conteneur, Colobane, 2017
Mbilia Bel
Nakei Nairobi, 2010

"Mbilia Bel is one of the leading figures of the Congolese rumba genre. This song always takes me back to my childhood in Dakar!" CN

Born in Kinshasa, DRC, in 1959, Mbilia Bel is a singer who became one of the icons of Congolese rumba in the 1980s, working towards the recognition of this musical genre throughout the world.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Brise-Soleils des Indépendances, installation presented during the Dakar Biennal, 2018
Henri Chomette (1921-1995)
Architecte

Click on the sides to scroll through images

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

Hôtel de Ville, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, 1956
Henri Chomette (1921 - 1995)
Architecte

"I am passionate about the research and achievements of the architect Henri Chomette. In France, his work is very little known but for me, he has realized some of the most emblematic buildings in West Africa such as the former Independence Hotel, now unfortunately destroyed in Dakar, Senegal, the School of Administration still in Dakar, the City Hall of Abidjan in Ivory Coast or the National Palace of Cotonou in Benin.

Chomette worked only with African craftsmen who were involved in the design of the buildings and used only local materials. He was a precursor of what the historian of the architect Kenneth Frampton would later call "critical regionalism", i.e. the development of an architectural thought anchored in a territory and defined by the specificities that constitute it.

I also like the architecture of Eduardo Souto de Moura, which was developed in the same vein in Portugal in the 1980s." CN

Henri Chomette (1921-1995) is a French architect. A student of Tony Garnier, he is a graduate of the Lyon School of Fine Arts. He then continued his studies at the Paris School of Fine Arts, under the guidance of Auguste Perret and Otello Zavaroni. He won the competition for the Imperial Palace of Ethiopia in 1948 and moved to Ethiopia in 1949. He was appointed chief architect of the city of Addis Ababa from 1953 to 1959. He is the architect of many emblematic buildings in several African countries.
Artworks
Manthia Diawara et Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Sembène Ousmane: The Making of African Cinema, 1994

"Sembène Ousmane: the Making of African Cinema is a documentary on Sembène Ousmane made in the early 1990s that shows the public figure, the writer, the director. It approaches the work of Sembène Ousmane but also his universe through his interests, his habits... We see the man as he was. It is a good introduction to the emblematic work of Ousmane." CN

Manthia Diawara, born in 1953 in Bamako, is a writer and literature professor of Malian origin living in the United States. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, born January 5, 1938 in Kamiriithu (near Nairobi), is a Kenyan writer of Kikuyu and English language. He is currently Professor and Director of the International Center for Writing & Translation at the University of California at Irvine.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Cinéma ABC, Dakar, 2015
Artworks
Mulatu Astatke
Yegelle Tezeta, 2004

"I rediscovered the jazz music of the Ethiopian Mulatu Astatke when I watched Jim Jarmush's film Broken Flowers, for which he wrote part of the soundtrack. It brought back a lot of memories of my uncles listening to this music years before in Dakar." CN

Mulatu Astatke is an Ethiopian musician and arranger, born in 1943 in Jimma, Ethiopia. He is known as the father of ethio-jazz. Active from the early 1960s to the present, Mulatu was musically trained in London, New York City, and Boston where he combined his jazz and Latin music interests with traditional Ethiopian music.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Cinema Arte Continua, 2018
Click on the sides to scroll through images

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

Cheikh Ndiaye, Cinéma El Mansour, Treichville, 2014
Artworks
Alain Badiou
L'Être et l'Événement, 1988
"This philosophical text by Alain Badiou, which I discovered in the 2000s, has left a deep impression on me and has greatly nourished my philosophical thinking. The way Badiou structures his thinking, his system of thought have inspired me a lot and I find many resonances between this text and the aesthetic reflection that I develop as a painter. And yet, our two fields of application are not so close at first glance… " CN

Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, novelist and playwright of Marxist inspiration born on January 17, 1937 in Rabat (Morocco). L'Être et l'Événement is one of his emblematic works, published by Editions du Seuil in January 1988 and composed of thirty-seven "meditations".

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Hann Bel-Air, 2009
Click on the sides to scroll through images

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

(View more details about this item in a popup).

Cheikh Ndiaye, Atelier Peinture, 2016
Mamadou Diouf et Rosalind Fredericks
Les Arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal - Espaces contestés et civilités urbaines, 2013
"This collective work is really interesting! The various authors offer their point of view on Dakar, a city in expansion and the diversity of power relations that structure the urban space and the aesthetic responses that emerge to address them."

CN

Mamadou Diouf is a Senegalese historian who takes an uncompromising look at contemporary societies in Africa. Since 2007, he has been head of the Institute of African Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York.

Rosalind Fredericks is a professor at New York University. Her favorite topics are the economic politics of development, global urbanism, and post-colonial identities in Africa.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Privatisation d'un espace par son ciel, 2016
Canaletto (1697 - 1768)
Peintre

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), better known as Canaletto, is a Venetian painter famous for his panoramas (vedute) of Venice.

He is one of the most important representatives of Italian 'vedutism' (or cityscape painting). Together with Giambattista Pittoni and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, he is one of the main Italian Old Masters of the Venetian Renaissance.

His paintings combine the geometric rigour of perspective with a luminous representation of the play of light and shadow, combining the order of the buildings with the swarming life on the waters of the Grand Canal or the commemorative representation of solemn and sumptuous events.

Image : Canaletto, View of the Grand Canal towards the Punta della Dogana from Campo San Vio c. 1740/45
- Artworks
  Cheikh Ndiaye
  Détail Cinéma Aboussouan, 2012
  technique mixte sur toile
  160 x 190 cm
- Artworks
  Cheikh Ndiaye
  Entrée Cinéma Liberté Dakar, 2015
  Acrylique sur papier
  80 x 110 cm
Jeff Wall
Photographe
"Jeff Wall's photographs have always struck me by their connection to matter. Jeff Wall knows art history and aesthetic philosophy very well. Before taking a picture, he applies all the stages of the construction of the cinematic image: location, staging, lighting... Behind all this image making, it's almost like a documentary approach - what he calls the cinematograph." CN

Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall (1946) is a Canadian visual artist. He defended a thesis on the Dada movement and taught art history in Canada. This contemporary photographer owes his importance to the fact that he renews the way documentary photography is made and leads the viewer to question and modify his perception of reality.

Image : Jeff Wall, A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai), 1993
Artworks
Ousmane William Mbaye
Président Dia, 2012

"The film reminds us of a figure of Dia that the younger generation in Senegal doesn't know. Dia embodies a missed political appointment in Senegal, at a time when the state was in tune with the country's situation, a time when development was still seen as a contract between the people and the state. Once again, this is an ideology rooted in the territory it intends to govern. The inspiration didn't last and then everything changed with the policies of structural readjustments." CN

Born in 1952, Ousmane William Mbaye is a Senegalese filmmaker. He directed for example Mère-bi, la mère in 2008, a portrait of Annette Mbaye d'Erneville, Kemtiyu Cheikh Anta, a portrait of Cheikh Anta Diop, or Iron and glass, a portrait of the Senegalese visual artist Anta Germaine Gaye as well as a wide range of fictions and documentaries.

Image : Cheikh Ndiaye, Penc mi, ex cinema El Hadj, 2012

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.