Mon Super Kilomètre

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation is delighted to support MSK at this year’s Dak’Art Biennale. The project perpetuates our goal of making first-rate art accessible to the broadest possible audience, and out of the elite domain of museums

MSK also provides ample evidence of Anni and Josef Albers’s belief that useful objects can enhance life just as “fine art” does. MSK realizes that faith with rare elegance and style. Much of the work exemplifies Anni Albers’s love of “starting at zero,” as well as Josef Albers’s ardent belief in “minimal means for maximum effect.”

The use of cotton hand-dyed by the Senegalese couturiers Maam Samba to create this wall of sky along the median honors one of the main goals of the Albers Foundation in Senegal. Maam Samba, based in a rural community, employs hundreds of people to create beautiful cotton objects. You will also see representations of work done at Thread, our artists’ residencies and cultural center in rural Tambacounda, and other examples of creative work done in the Tambacounda region, including hand-woven, natural fiber shade structures. There is also work by Tamba’s Salio Diop, a remarkable sculptor who uses found materials and directs a cultural house of his own, Bankuba Art. Neggadou, a rapper and leader in Tambacounda who has started a garden project in urban areas to combat clandestine immigration, which he calls Art’Griculture, is here as well. Throughout the Medina neighborhood and MSK’s film programming, you will encounter the work of Giovanni Hänninen and Alberto Amoretti. Matthias Persson, a participant in the international artists’ residency program at Thread, developed, when he was there, a project that incorporated meandering lines through the village; for MSK, he has taken this idea in a new direction. The photographs of Dakar nightlife in the 1960s by Roger Da Silva are also featured, and fit into the range of the Albers Foundation’s commitment to the culture of Senegal.

We congratulate the MSK team’s call to promote “nous dans nous” (“the we in us.”) Supporting this wonderful project in a local Dakar neighborhood alongside this international Biennale, which we do with great honor, continues our wish to make thread-like linkages and connection with the wonderful country of Senegal in its myriad aspects.

www.thread-senegal.org
albersfoundation.org
www.aflk.org