Guinea-Bissau, where there are virtually no art galleries, no art schools and little government funding for the arts, has just staged its first biennale.
Miguel de Barros, executive director of MoAC Biss, an art biennale in Guinea-Bissau, introducing the event earlier this month.Credit…
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.
Credit: New York Times
