There is something worth sitting with in the decision to end a year of looking at contemporary African art with a question about how to live. How to live alongside one another, how to help each other or how to make room for the lives that exist beyond our own. Under the theme (Anti)Fragility: Arts of Repair and Strategies of Rebound, the 16th edition of the Dak’Art Biennale will take place in Senegal from 19 November to 19 December 2026 with the invitation to consider what it means to sustain life in a world shaped by uncertainty, cyclical rupture, uprisings and change.
Beyond human relationships, the biennale’s artistic director Morad Montazami describes the 54 artists central to his thinking as those with practices that seek to “rethink our ways of living together, helping one another, and coexisting,” in a way that prioritises all living things. The word rethink matters here. It suggests that the conditions of our coexistence are neither settled nor inevitable. They can be questioned, reconsidered and, perhaps, remade.
But what does it mean to become (anti)fragile?
The concept of antifragility, popularised by writer and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb, describes the capacity of certain systems to grow or improve through disorder and stress. It moves beyond resilience, which concerns the ability to withstand difficulty or recover from it. Applied to art and the conditions of living, however, the idea becomes more complicated. Must suffering produce growth? Must every rupture become an opportunity for renewal? And what happens when the language of resilience places the responsibility for overcoming adversity on those already living with its consequences?
These are useful questions to carry through the biennale. They allow fragility to remain a condition worthy of care rather than a weakness that must be overcome. They also make space for the possibility that repair does not always mean returning to what existed before. Sometimes it means acknowledging a loss, preserving what remains, or imagining different ways of being together.
Dak’Art’s curatorial framework offers several routes into this investigation. Across its five strands, the biennale considers decolonial ecology and agricultural resistance, the histories and practices of marronage, care and repair, the sharing of knowledge, and connections between Africa and its diasporas. These are distinct points of entry, but they meet around a shared concern with the relationships, histories and systems that make survival and coexistence possible.
As visitors move through Dakar, these ideas might be encountered in unexpected places. A work concerned with land may invite consideration of the knowledge carried by plants, farming practices and communities whose relationships with the environment have endured despite disruption. Another may turn towards histories of escape and refusal, asking what freedom requires and what it costs. Elsewhere, an artwork might operate as an archive, holding knowledge that has been excluded from official histories or passed between generations beyond institutional recognition.
The invitation is to look closely at what each work makes visible, what it asks to be reconsidered, and whose knowledge it allows to travel. The 54 selected artistic proposals are not required to offer a single answer to the biennale’s central questions. Each enters the conversation from a particular position, carrying its own histories, materials and ways of understanding the world.
This is also why the biennale must be encountered beyond its official exhibition spaces. Dak’Art’s wider OFF programme extends across Senegal, bringing exhibitions and artistic encounters into the city and beyond. Together, these spaces form a broader picture of contemporary artistic practice, shaped by the people, institutions and communities that make cultural life possible. They also remind us that visibility alone does not guarantee material support. The relationships built around an artwork, and the attention it receives after an exhibition closes, matter to the conditions under which artistic practice can continue.
Perhaps the most generous way to approach (Anti)Fragility is to understand it as an investigation held together by a proposition of hope. Not the promise that difficulty will make us stronger, but the possibility that we might respond to difficulty differently when knowledge is shared, care is practised and responsibility is understood collectively.
As contemporary African art reaches the close of another year of exhibitions, conversations and encounters, Dak’Art offers an opportunity to consider what these practices make possible. Moving through Dakar, the question is not only how life endures, but what kinds of relationships allow it to flourish, and how those relationships might be extended to lives and worlds beyond our own.
The answers may not be conclusive. They may emerge instead through the experience of looking, listening and moving between works, allowing each encounter to complicate what was understood before. In this sense, the biennale is less a declaration of what living together should mean than an invitation to imagine what it could become.