The librettist : Simon Njami

Born in 1962 in Lausanne, Njami is a writer and an independent curator, lecturer, art critic and essayist.

Co-founder of Revue Noire, the first journal of contemporary African and extra-occidental art, Njami has published novels and biographies about James Baldwin and Léopold Sédar Senghor.

He is the Artistic Director of many Biennales and conceived several international exhibitions. Well known for the exhibition “Africa Remix” presented at the beginning of our century in Düsseldorf (Museum Kunst Palast), London (Hayward Gallery), Paris (Centre Pompidou), Tokyo (Mori Museum), Stockholm (Moderna Museet) and Johannesburg (Johannesburg Art Gallery), from 2004 to 2007, he also co-curated the first African Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Among many art shows, he curated the exhibition “The Divine Comedy – Heaven, Hell, Purgatory by Contemporary African Artists” shown at MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main) in 2014, The SCAD Museum of Art and at Smithsonian Institution, Washington, in 2015.

He curated “Afriques Capitales” in La Villette (Paris) and Gare Saint-Sauveur (Lille), in France, in 2017.

Invited to be part of numerous art and photography juries, such as the World Press Photo Contest, the Hasselblad Award, Njami is the Art Adviser of the Sindika Dokolo Foundation (Luanda) and the Artistic Director of the Donwahi Foundation (Abidjan) and member of scientific boards of numerous museums.

Simon Njami is the Artistic Director of the 13/14th edition of the Dakar Biennale in 2016/2018, the major art event on the African continent.