FIAC 2021: Cheikh Ndiaye paints the memory of cinemas in Africa

The Senegalese artist Cheikh Ndiaye has been painting since 2010 a series of paintings on abandoned or missing cinemas in Africa.

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

8 mins

He painted around fifty abandoned or missing cinemas on the African continent.

And Cheikh Ndiaye, 51 years old, born in Dakar, confides to us without hesitation: " 

If there had been a school of architecture or cinema in Senegal, I would not have become a painter

 ".

At FIAC, the largest contemporary art fair in France, this artist, modest as his motifs and smiling as the colors on his paintings, is currently exhibiting new works from his wonderful series which fascinates many people.

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: How did the idea of ​​working on abandoned cinemas in Africa come about

?

It came to me when we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the independence of many African countries.

It was in 2010. I was looking for a witness object that could bear witness to these fifty years and how it is now.

After my research, I realized that it was the cinemas.

These objects were there, many of them were there before or at the time of independence, until now.

What is your earliest memory of a movie theater

?

I realized after my first artistic experience was when my grandmother took me to the movies.

I must have been five or six years old.

Suddenly, I think that my attraction to architecture, films and cinemas, comes from this first experience.

Do you still remember which cinema and which film it was

?

Yes, I think it was a cinema which was in Dakar, but which no longer exists.

It was called

Le Paris

.

It was completely demolished.

As for the movie, I can't remember if it was around this time or later, I must have seen a Bruce Lee movie.

So I always relate that first experience to Bruce Lee.

View of Cheikh Ndiaye's paintings on cinemas in Africa at the Cécile Fakhoury gallery at FIAC 2021. © Siegfried Forster / RFI

And when was your first contact with a work of art

?

What is funny, for a long time, my parents rented our house to a plastic artist who was at the Beaux-Arts in Dakar.

It was my first contact with a work of art.

I think I had desecrated his work a bit, because I waited until he came out to start painting over what he was painting.

I remember that well [laughs].

Did you also go to the cinema in Dakar that you painted

?

Yes.

In fact, I know all the cinemas in Dakar.

I practiced them before they closed.

I knew them very well.

I have memories that are related to that.

What is interesting beyond me is that I collect a lot of memories through these movie theaters.

A lot of people tell me, yes, we used to organize clandestine meetings there, others tell me: "I met my wife in front of this movie theater", and so on.

There are many memories attached to these rooms.

You started this series in 2010. How many cinemas have you seen, explored and painted since

?

A good fifty and beyond Senegal.

I have traveled a lot in Côte d'Ivoire, Morocco, and there, I will also move to Ghana, Togo, etc.

to also collect people's experiences with these cinemas.

What is the venue that impressed you the most

?

“Le Paris” is a pity that it no longer exists.

It was across from Independence Square, just around the corner from what they called the Teranga Hotel.

It was really downtown, a very nice room.

Detail of Cheikh Ndiaye's painting on the Cinema Bioscope Troyville in Johannesburg (2021).

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

Outside of Senegal, what struck you when you discovered abandoned movie theaters

?

When I take the case of

Apollo Theater

[in Harlem, painted in 2015, Editor's note] which was also a cinema, it's really a place where a lot of big groups, singers, men known in the world black have occurred. It is a mythical room. These are things that mark me a lot. What a room contains as memory. My relationship to architecture is the idea that architecture is objects of memory, like boxes that contain memory and memories. There is a whole story surrounding a room like 

Apollo.

This is often what guides me in my choice of rooms to paint.

With all these theatrical stories, what do you want to provoke or show through your paintings

?

A nostalgia reflex, a call to do otherwise

?

Today, these rooms have become something else.

For example, many have become churches, others warehouses.

The first room I had to paint was the

El Mansour

cinema

in Dakar, which has become a supermarket.

It also reflects this ability of people in Africa to recycle all the time: spaces, objects, etc.

Obviously, there is a part of nostalgia, especially when the cinema disappears, but we can really do a study and see how this Africa is regenerating itself through these spaces and these objects.

In some countries in Africa, there is also a certain revival of cinemas, for example in Lagos, Nigeria, or Burkina Faso where Ciné Guimbi is being reborn.

Could this also be a subject for you as a painter

?

In Dakar, for example, the

Liberté

cinema

was bought and once again became a cinema and a concert hall, etc.

I will campaign for there to be these places of meeting, of discovery of oneself and of others, because cinema was that.

In Burkina Faso, there is currently the largest film festival in Africa.

Do you know the Fespaco and Burkinabè theaters

?

I have never been to Burkina Faso, but I will not delay going there… It is a must-see place when it comes to cinema in Africa.

This will definitely be one of my next trips, but I couldn't tell you the name of a movie theater, although I often see it on the Internet and I keep the pictures…

View of Cheikh Ndiaye's paintings on cinemas in Africa at the Cécile Fakhoury gallery at FIAC 2021. © Siegfried Forster / RFI

Your works have passed through the National Gallery in Senegal and the Dak'Art International Biennale, the collections of the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat, the Venice and Havana Biennials. Your painting style is quite concrete, very material, often figurative. How do you live our very digital age

? As a painter, do you feel that people are looking more and more for tangible art, with subjects to touch

?

I think all of my works contain a story.

A social and political history.

What interests me in relation to oil painting, that it is an ancestral, historical medium.

The question for me was how to inscribe in this very ancestral medium patterns that come from Africa.

Compared to digital: I also work with digital, but to restore things to painting.

I don't just stop at digital.

It is a tool.

I use these tools like everyone else, but I use these tools to help me paint, to render what I feel, what I want to paint.

You were born in Dakar.

Before your training at the Fine Arts in Dakar in Senegal and in Lyon in France, how did you come to art

?

At one point, I asked myself the question.

I think that if there had been an architecture or cinema school in Senegal, I would not have become a painter or plastic artist, because it was really my first (loves), which spoke to me the most.

But, at that time, there was none.

So, for me, getting to art was a way of getting around to, little by little, getting closer to the things that spoke to me.

Today, I find myself being a painter, painting cinemas.

Cheikh Ndiaye, the Senegalese artist's first solo show in Europe with unpublished works on the Cécile Fakhoury gallery stand at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC), until October 24, 2020.

► 

To read also: 

Opening of Fespaco 2021, African cinema in a mode of resistance and renewal

► To read also: 

Unesco, Netflix and the great challenge of the film industry in Africa

► To read also: 

Burkina Faso: the Neerwaya cinema, an institution in Ouagadougou, against all odds

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