El Hadji Sy combines art and politics to highlight social, historical, and moral conflicts. In the 1970s, he developed his practice in critical engagement with the Négritude movement shaped by President Léopold Sédar Senghor, which made an aesthetic of Black modernity influenced by European modernism the state’s guiding principle. This artistic and cultural-political counterposition gave rise to collectives such as Laboratoire Agit’Art and Village des Arts, in which Sy moved art from official institutions to self-managed spaces and sought alternative forms of working and exhibiting. Together with other artists, he transformed these places, often remnants of French colonial infrastructure, into experimental fields for negotiating socially relevant issues. His generation grew up in the immediate post-colonial period, which was marked by debates about independence, a new cultural policy, and narratives such as the one about the Tirailleurs. The exhibition shows a selection of works, including figures painted on wood that are mounted as door leaves. The resulting passageways invite visitors to enter an imaginative place. At these thresholds, Sy negotiates Black bodies and subjectivity in the post-colonial space, exposing overlapping memories and condensing knowledge from the past with unresolved questions of the present. His works counter dominant narratives of colonial history and bring marginalized experiences to life. The history of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais is one such memory that has long been marginalized and still awaits recognition and reappraisal. The female figures in Les Nubians (2017) broaden the view beyond Senegal and suggest that countless other narratives are waiting to be seen, told, or even found in the first place. 

Works in the exhibition: Untitled (2019), installation, 4 door paintings, acrylic on wood, frame, each c.205 × 80 × 3.5 cm; Untitled (undated), acrylic on wood, diptych, left: 209 × 77 × 3.5 cm, right: 210 × 75 × 3.5 cm; Les Nubians (2017), mixed media, acrylic, oil, and tar on canvas, 200 × 160 cm; Le pretesse (2021), mixed media, acrylic on canvas, 74 × 59 × 3.5 cm. All courtesy of Galerie Barbara Thumm