It has been announced that the Senegalese artist Issa Samb has died on 25 April, in Dakar.
Samb was a founding member of the seminal collective Laboratoire Agit-Art, formed in 1973, which brought together artists, musicians, filmakers, writers and performers. Laboratoire Agit-Art turned against the ideas on art promoted by then-president Léopold Sédar Senghor (himself a poet and cultural theorist), developing an iconoclastic collective artistic practice which emphasised ideas of process, experimentation and agitation. Samb’s work brought together objects, the artist’s own presence and the audience’s participation, combining African artistic traditions with unconventional and avant-garde techniques. The Laboratoire’s squatted premises were eventually demolished by the authorities in 1983, but Samb would go on to found the TENQ workshop, also in Dakar, 1996. His work would become the subject of growing attention throughout the next decades, with exhibitions at London‘s Whitechapel Gallery in 1995 and inIVA in 2004 and then 2014, a retrospective at the National Art Gallery, Dakar in 2010, his inclusion in documenta (13) in 2012 and a solo exhibition in Oslo’s OCA in 2013.
Read Osei Bonsu’s feature on the influence of Samb and Laboratoire Agit-Art, from the November 2014 issue of ArtReview
26 April 2017
