The inclusion of Issa Samb in In Minor Keys, the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, extends beyond representation; it reactivates a practice that fundamentally resisted closure. Born on 31 December 1945 in Dakar and also known as Joe Ouakam, Samb occupied a singular position within contemporary African art as a painter, sculptor, performance artist, playwright, and poet. His multidisciplinary approach was not an expansion of form for its own sake, but a deliberate refusal of categorization—one that positioned his work outside conventional artistic boundaries while remaining deeply embedded in intellectual and social life.
Educated at the University of Dakar, where he studied philosophy and law, Samb’s practice was shaped by a rigorous engagement with ideas. This philosophical grounding would become central to his artistic language, informing a body of work that consistently blurred the line between thinking and making. His adoption of the name Joe Ouakam further signaled a constructed artistic identity—one that moved fluidly between persona, performance, and lived experience. Within this framework, the artist was not a fixed subject but an evolving presence.
Samb’s work unfolds across sculpture, installation, performance, theatre, and writing, often collapsing distinctions between these forms entirely. Drawing from both African traditions and European avant-garde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, and Fluxus, he developed a practice that was at once locally grounded and globally conversant. Yet rather than aligning himself with any singular lineage, Samb produced a language that remained deliberately unclassifiable—resisting both Western categorization and reductive readings of African art.
Central to this practice was his courtyard studio in Dakar, located on Rue Jules Ferry, which functioned as a living, evolving artwork. Filled with found objects, fragments, texts, and materials in continuous transformation, the space operated as both archive and site of production. Works were rarely completed; instead, they accumulated, shifted, and reconfigured over time. This refusal of finality positioned Samb’s practice as an ongoing process rather than a series of discrete objects, challenging the very notion of what constitutes an artwork.
This approach is inseparable from his role as a founding member of the Laboratoire Agit’Art in the early 1970s, alongside figures such as Djibril Diop Mambety, El Hadj Sy, and Youssoufa Dione. The collective emerged as a radical response to both colonial legacies and post-independence cultural policies in Senegal. It rejected institutional frameworks and instead fostered an environment of experimentation, improvisation, and collective action, bringing together multiple disciplines in a shared intellectual space.
Within this context, Samb actively worked against the cultural aesthetics promoted by Leopold Sedar Senghor, whose vision of African art often emphasized a stylized and essentialized notion of identity. Samb’s practice disrupted these narratives through provocation and refusal, challenging the expectation that African art should conform to predetermined symbolic or decorative frameworks. His work instead embraced ambiguity, fragmentation, and critical engagement, positioning art as a site of questioning rather than affirmation.
Materiality plays a crucial role in this questioning. Samb’s use of found and discarded objects—threads, fabrics, branches, clothing, and everyday debris—transforms the ordinary into carriers of meaning. These materials, often marked by time and use, introduce a temporal dimension to his installations, suggesting processes of accumulation, decay, and renewal. Installed around a central tree within his courtyard, these elements form a dynamic, ever-changing environment—a total artwork that reflects both individual expression and collective experience.
At the core of Samb’s practice is a sustained engagement with knowledge—how it is produced, shared, and contested. His installations frequently incorporate handwritten texts, philosophical fragments, and symbolic gestures, creating layered compositions that resist immediate interpretation. Rather than presenting fixed meanings, Samb constructs spaces of thought, where viewers are invited to navigate complexity and ambiguity. In this sense, his work operates as a form of living philosophy.
This emphasis on process, thought, and openness aligns closely with the curatorial framework of In Minor Keys, shaped by Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition’s focus on subtlety, accumulation, and non-dominant narratives mirrors Samb’s own approach. His work does not seek visibility through spectacle; instead, it unfolds slowly, requiring attention and engagement. Within the Biennale, this mode of practice challenges dominant expectations of scale, immediacy, and resolution.
Samb’s international recognition reflects the breadth of his influence. His work has been presented at major exhibitions including Seven Stories of Modern Art in Africa at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Dak’Art in Dakar, and documenta 13 in Kassel. A retrospective at the National Art Gallery in Dakar in 2010 and exhibitions such as Issa Samb: From the Ethics of Acting to the Empire Without Signs further positioned his practice within global discourse. Yet despite this visibility, his work retained a strong connection to Dakar, where his presence in the community remained central.
Indeed, Samb was as much a presence as he was an artist. His engagement with the public—through conversation, performance, and daily interaction—made him a central figure in Dakar’s cultural life. His studio functioned not only as a site of production but as a space of encounter, where ideas were exchanged and relationships formed. This social dimension reinforces the understanding of his practice as relational, collective, and open-ended.
Within the Venice Biennale, this relationality takes on particular significance. The Biennale, historically structured around national representation and discrete exhibitions, often imposes boundaries—between artists, practices, and identities. Samb’s work resists such containment. It dissolves distinctions between art and life, object and process, individual and collective, offering instead a model of practice that is fluid and expansive.
The continued relevance of Issa Samb lies in this refusal to conform. At a moment when contemporary art is increasingly shaped by institutional and market forces, his work offers an alternative grounded in autonomy and critical engagement. As Koyo Kouoh has noted, Samb and the Laboratoire Agit’Art operated without the need to justify themselves to dominant systems, creating a practice that remains deeply empowering.
In In Minor Keys, this empowerment becomes visible through a quieter, more reflective lens. Samb’s work does not dominate space; it transforms it, inviting viewers into a process of thinking and rethinking. It resists resolution, embracing instead uncertainty, multiplicity, and ongoing change.
Ultimately, Samb’s practice challenges us to reconsider what art can be. Not an object, but a process. Not a statement, but a question. Not a fixed form, but a living, evolving system of thought.
