Ngoor, feeling as a way of creating October 5, 2026
Artist designated for the “Tribute Artist” section of the 16th edition of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, the late visual artist Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob known as Ngoor will see his memory saluted and revived through an exhibition at the National Art Gallery.
During the 2026 Dakar Biennale, the National Gallery of Art will receive the “Tribute Artist” section, with the late artist Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob known as Ngoor in the spotlight. Curated by Ndeye Rokhaya Gueye, the monographic exhibition entitled “The Wisdom of Ordeal” will bring together, from November 19 to December 19, a selection of paintings and sculptures by Ngoor. This is to remember an artist who engaged in a spiritual conversation with his work, beyond the material. It is the celebration of an artist who rewrote the social and internal disturbances of life. The traces are minimal for Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob known as Ngoor, an artist who died in 2017, at the age of 44. A study dissertation, signed by Caroline Janin and titled “The representativeness of contemporary African art in France: example of the Jean-Paul Blachère Foundation” (2008), offers part of his biography. The university document informs us that “Ngoor, young Senegalese painter”, is the winner of the Blachère Foundation prize, worth 3,000 euros. At 34, he had attracted the attention of critics with “his obsessive and tormented works”.
Ngoor’s work is fully consistent with the general theme of the 16th edition of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, “(anti)fragility: arts of repair and strategies of backlash”. This concept developed by Morad Montazami, artistic director of the Dakar Biennale 2026, is the ability to reinvent one’s fragility into strength. It is a posture of resistance which consists for the artist, and for humans in general, in calmly absorbing their shocks and making their traumas an engine of rebirth and creativity. (Anti)fragility is another opportunity to care for humans, nature, and all living things in our world.
Ndeye Rokhaya Gueye, designated curator of the tribute exhibition, affirmed this support, already in 2008, in these terms: “The plastic work of Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob is centered around a quest for the truth of being. It sensitively depicts the human and animal part that is in each of us and which determines our everyday behavior.” The selection of Ngoor for the tribute artist is therefore a fitting symbol. The deceased is, somewhere, the spectral totem of this Dakar 2026 Biennale.
The footsteps of a meteoroid artist
“Ngoor embodies a lot of wisdom. In his thirties, he seems so much older. And as soon as it comes to his hermetic work, he turns away,” continued Ndeye Rokhaya Gueye, to describe Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob whose sharp sense of his artistic approach rested beneath his shyness.
Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob’s work is like a mirror which seeks to reveal, behind the material, different existential dimensions. It concerns intellect, aesthetics, morality, spirituality, etc. His work aims to offer humans broad lenses of understanding of the world, driven by their inner turmoil. The rational and the intuitive are inseparable in the late artist: they accompany each other as much as they face each other. Wood, recovered objects, textures and other materials are invested with a dimension that goes beyond physical reality. In the July 26, 2005 issue of the daily Le Soleil, an article signed by journalist Mathieu Bacaly reported on Ngoor’s exhibition at the Ifan African Art Museum. From July 21 to 31, 2005, the artist presented around thirty of his paintings and sculptures. The paintings presented in this chapter, wrote Mathieu Bacaly, try “to reveal, in a harmonious and balanced way, all forms of internalized feelings”. The reporter deciphered Ngoor’s artistic approach as a questioning whose starting point is humanity and animality. “It’s not knowledge that is there and that I’m trying to give. But, there is an experience that was lived in relation to nature, men and others, and that I bring out to do a study,” explained the artist Abdoulaye Niokhor Bob known as Ngoor. The latter, as a manifesto of his art, affirmed that everyone, through their experience, their experience and their relationships with nature and human beings must take a position and define things according to their understanding, their understanding and their degree of maturity. It is all of the shocks and tendernesses of the soul that the artist attempts to translate, in an emotional way.
By Mamadou Oumar KAMARA
