Starting an art biennale in a small country with virtually no galleries and no art schools — not even a formal shop to frame paintings and photographs — could have seemed impossible, the stuff only of dreams.
But that’s exactly what a group of five artists from Guinea-Bissau, a nation of just over two million people in West Africa, decided to do.They could no longer sit “with their arms crossed and do nothing,” about what they saw as a dire gap in their country’s art infrastructure, said Nu Barreto, the visual and plastic arts curator of the country’s first biennale, MoAC Biss.
The biennale is designed in part to create more opportunities for local artists, who have few current ways to display their work: at an outdoor artisanal market, or at internationally funded venues such as the Centro Cultural Franco-Bissau-Guineense. MoAC Biss, which began May 1 and runs through May 31 in Bissau, the capital city, features some 150 artists, from 17 countries.
The curators and founders of the biennale, from left: Antonio Spencer Embaló, Nu Barreto, Zaida Pereira, Welket Bungué, Karyna Gomes, Miguel de Barros, Mamadu Alimo Djaló.
The event was designed to cover more disciplines than just visual arts. “We know what the challenges are for the writers, painters, artists and theaters and dancers, and that’s why we said, OK we are starting with five,” Barreto said. The biennale’s vibrant opening night concluded with a concert by the Bissau-Guinean band Furkuntunda, who had not played live for 18 years. Welket Bungué, the performing arts and moving images curator,called the performance “cathartic.”
The group was brought together by Karyna Gomes, the music coordinator, who joined the group onstage to sing to a theater so packed that people were seating in the aisles. That the biennale was even opening was something of a feat, because it had lost more than half of its funding three weeks earlier when government upheavals in Portugal and Brazil — countries that had pledged support — caused funding to dry up. Then a nationwide blackout in Spain and Portugal delayed the arrival of one of the theater troupes.
