Dorcy Rugamba in Dakar to showcase his art works, ‘Les Restes suprêmes’

RENOWNED RWANDAN ARTIST Dorcy Rugamba is in Dakar alongside other collectives and artistes like Nathalie Vairac, Malang Sonko, François Sauveur, Marc Soriano and Michael Makembe to showcase his visual art works dubbed ‘Le Reste Supreme’ at the on-going Dak’Art African contemporary art biennale 2022. The Dak’Art African contemporary art biennale, which is being held in Dakar, Senegal, is a major biennale of contemporary art in Africa and one of the ten major biennales in the world. The exhibition, ‘Les Restes Suprêmes,’ which translates into Supreme Remnants kicked off on May 21, and runs until June 10, at The Museum of Black Civilisation in Dakar. The project, which revolves around a space of more than 300 square meters, according to Rugamba, aims to question the role played by African art in the construction of a Eurocentric vision of the world. “My goal is to question the use of these masks in the different rituals and stages with which they have been associated throughout history”. “What is exhibited in this work is not the mask but the museum institution itself. The installation, in its plasticity as in the story that carries it, seeks to probe the social function and ideology of the Western ethnographic museum, and trace the course of its history,” said Rugamba, the brains behind the exhibition. Through the eyes and the memory of the mask, Rugamba seeks to take on these places and those who animate them an offbeat and fantastic, which highlights the most salient points. “The Supreme Remnants seek to deconstruct the very framework of museums, by exposing the viewer to the ideological charge of objects immured”. “Each gallery represents both a real site, physical but also a mental space. Visitors move through a hallucinated vision, projected by the eyes of the mask. The mask takes the visitor, backwards from history, on a journey through time and space, which traces its journey from Africa to Europe,” he added. For the Dakar Biennale, Rwanda Arts Initiative collaborated and co-produced the great form of the Supreme Remnants with the Company of the Moon, created and directed in Dakar by actress Nathalie Vairac. More than 60 craftsmen, technicians and artists worked for a month and a half to build the installation which spreads over more than 300 square meter. Dorcy Rugamba is a director stage, actor and playwright Rwandan. He got the first prize in art drama from the Royal Conservatory of music from Liège. He was first trained in performing arts by his father Cyprien Rugamba, poet, choreographer, composer and creator of the National Museum of Rwanda. Installed between Brussels and Kigali, Dorcy Rugamba co-wrote in 1999 the part ‘Rwanda 94’ and founded in 2001 the Urwintore Workshops, a creative space contemporary in Kigali.

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Dorcy Rugamba in Dakar to showcase his art works, ‘Les Restes suprêmes’