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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of Koyo Kouoh, Bisi Silva and Abdellah Karroum, three international curators who respectively founded independent art spaces in Dakar, Lagos and Rabat, in the development of a recognition of contemporary African art in these cities.

Paper long abstract:

Since the beginning of the 21st Century, Contemporary African art has gained in importance in the West. African curators, mostly Western-based, are active agent of this development and become advocates for the whole continent despite themselves. They occupy a position of authority, having the power to advance artists careers or to break them if we consider a curator as a "culture broker who mediate the value of artworks in economic and critical discourse" (Ogbechie, 2010). Therefore, when they operate from outside the African continent, and tend to promote essentially artists from the Diaspora, their curatorship is sometimes interpreted as "harmful and detrimental to the growth of contemporary art on the mother continent" (Wemega-Kwawu, 2011) because they are seen as the West's vassals.

Facing the problem, some curators try to decolonize African curatorship and to give contemporary African art a possibility to grow on the continent by establishing new independent contemporary art spaces that are working both on a local and on an international level in order to raise awareness, educate and promote contemporary African art as an actual cultural practice. Amongst them, Abdellah Karroum founded L'Appartement 22 in Rabat in 2002, Bisi Silva founded the CCA Lagos in 2007 and Koyo Kouoh founded RAW Material Company in Dakar in 2008. If these spaces are internationally praised, what is their impact on a local scale? Established by a certain urban elite, how these art centers are interacting with local audiences? Are they changing the urban cultural economy?