Omar Ba, a Senegalese painter, begins to paint a five-metre-long canvas in a deep, dark shade of black. Most of Ba's works, which question the state of the world and Africa's place in it, begin in this manner.
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Ba's work is now on display in his home country, at the 14th Dakar Biennale, after being shown in a number of important galleries and museums around the world.
Ba, 45, is a standout at the 14th Dakar Biennale, where his work explores colonialism, violence, and hope.
"We see white as the neutral color, the pure color, the innocent color," he explained. "Black is always associated with what is dirty, what is dark... and this can have an impact on the person who lives these cliches."
Ba currently has 20 pieces on display at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, and an exhibition will open in New York in September. The Baltimore Museum of Art will host a retrospective of his work in November.
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His work is enigmatic, even hallucinatory, and intensely poetic, with dream-like visions of shimmering colors and hybrid creatures with the heads of a goat, a ram, or Horus, the falcon-headed Egyptian deity.
His creatures represent the traumas passed down from colonialism, tyranny, violence, and North-South inequalities.
He described the characters as "half-man, half-animal." "It's a nod to the natural within the human being, who I believe behaves like an animal in the jungle — we try to dominate others in order to survive."
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