C’est un appel à la solidarité particulièrement noble et puissant. Utiliser l’art comme vecteur de paix et comme espace d’expression pour les artistes palestiniens est une initiative forte.
Appel à la solidarité : ACU@DAK soutient « Il était une fois, Gaza »
Chers membres d’ACU@DAK,
Notre plateforme réunit de nombreux talents et, aujourd’hui, nous avons l’occasion de poser un acte d’humanité concret à travers l’art. Notre ami et frère Ousmane Dia, artiste sculpteur et peintre sénégalais engagé vivant en Suisse, a initié une grande exposition intitulée « Il était une fois, Gaza ».
Cet événement rassemble plusieurs artistes de talent, dont 8 artistes et cinéastes palestiniens invités.
Ousmane Dia utilise sa seule arme qui est son art pour crier une colère que nous partageons tous et pour revendiquer la paix.
Notre Objectif : Prendre en charge un invité
- Le défi : Financer entièrement la venue et la prise en charge de l’un des artistes invités.
- Le calcul : 370 membres x 10 000 F CFA = 3 700 000 F CFA.
- L’impact : Chaque contribution, petite ou grande, permettra d’atteindre ce but. L’essentiel est de participer pour que l’histoire retienne notre solidarité.
Comment participer ?
- Montant suggéré : 10 000 F CFA (ou selon vos capacités).
- Canaux de collecte : [+221 77 172 20 93 Pr Babacar MBAYE commissaire de l’exposition. Orange Money, Wave ]
- Date limite : 30 AOUT 2026
- Suivi : Un point régulier sur la cagnotte sera fait en toute transparence sur le groupe.
« Que Dieu nous aide à atteindre cet objectif. À travers l’art, c’est la paix que nous visons. Merci d’avance pour votre précieux apport. »
par Malick MBOW, président du Mouvement Bakku
Zoom sur l’Exposition : Un rendez-vous historique à Dakar
L’exposition « Il était une fois Gaza » est un événement culturel majeur d’une envergure internationale, conçu sur fonds propres par l’artiste pour briser le silence et éveiller les consciences.
- Lieu unique : Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, Dakar.
- Dates clés : Ouverture officielle le 23 octobre 2026 pour une durée exceptionnelle de trois mois (jusqu’en janvier 2027).
Une synergie inédite : Le parcours s’articule autour d’installations monumentales d’Ousmane Dia (dont sa célèbre signature, la structure de la chaise) faisant écho aux œuvres de 8 artistes palestiniens invités (peinture, photographie, calligraphie, cinéma).
Un enjeu de solidarité : L’organisation peine actuellement à financer le déplacement de tous ces artistes palestiniens. Notre action collective avec ACU@DAK assurera directement la prise en charge totale de l’un d’entre eux.
Portrait de l’Artiste : Qui est Ousmane Dia ?
Né en 1971 à Tambacounda (Sénégal), Ousmane Dia est un artiste plasticien et sculpteur engagé de renommée internationale qui vit et travaille à Genève depuis près de 30 ans.
- Une formation d’excellence : Diplômé de l’École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar, il a complété son cursus par un diplôme postgrade en sculpture à l’École Supérieure d’Arts Visuels de Genève.
- Sa signature artistique : Mondialement connu pour ses sculptures en métal de récupération, il utilise le motif symbolique de la chaise comme métaphore de l’assise, du droit à habiter sa terre, de l’absence et de la mémoire.
- Un rayonnement mondial : En parallèle de ses cours d’arts visuels en Suisse, ses créations sont exposées à travers toute l’Europe, l’Afrique et les États-Unis. Ses œuvres font aujourd’hui partie de collections publiques majeures comme celles de l’État du Sénégal, du Canton de Genève et de l’ONU.
« Mon travail a pour vocation d’être le relais de la voix des sans-voix. » – Ousmane Dia
CONCEPTUAL NOTE
« Once upon a time in GAZA »
Exhibition by Ousmane DIA
From 23 October 2026 to 8 January 2027
With the participation of nine Palestinian visual artists
Renaissance Monument, Dakar, Senegal
Curator: Professor Babacar Mbaye DIOP
A Swiss and Senegalese visual artist born in 1971 in Tambacounda in south-eastern Senegal,
Ousmane Dia has developed a body of work that is firmly rooted in contemporary African art,
characterised by formal freedom and a strong critical dimension. Trained in Dakar and then Geneva,
he combines artistic creation with teaching and cultural engagement.
His work is distinguished by a refined, direct aesthetic, free from identity or ethnographic
constraints. Without explicitly referring to Western art history, he engages with the global issues of
globalisation, migration, political violence and postcolonial memories.
With Once Upon a Time in GAZA, Ousmane Dia continues his practice of using art as a space for
expression, resistance and transmission, inviting the public to look, remember and take a stand. This
is a committed exhibition that Ousmane Dia presents as a testimony, a memorial and an act of
historical responsibility. Through monumental installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings, the
artist positions himself as a witness to his era, assuming the ethical role of art in the face of
violence in the contemporary world.
The exhibition takes as its starting point the dramatic situation in Gaza in the 21st century, which
the artist interprets as the ultimate expression of a prolonged colonial process, accompanied by the
systematic destruction of lives, territories and memories. In 2025, just when humanity thought it
had learned the lessons of the great tragedies of the 20th century—the Holocaust, the genocide of
the Tutsis in Rwanda, among others—Gaza appears to be the site of a global moral collapse, where
international law, humanism and collective conscience seem to have been suspended.
The title Once Upon a Time in GAZA deliberately appropriates the fairy tale formula to highlight
the tragic absurdity of a story that, far from belonging to the past, is unfolding before our very eyes.
It questions the very possibility of telling the story of Gaza in any other way than as an interrupted
fable, a confiscated future.
At the heart of the exhibition is the question of territory—not only as a geographical space, but as a
place of life, memory and identity. Gaza and, more broadly, Palestine are approached as human and
historical realities constantly threatened with symbolic and material erasure.
Ousmane Dia rejects any abstract or purely geopolitical approach. His work reinscribes Palestine in
a tangible reality: the land, absent bodies, everyday objects, simple gestures. The artist reminds us
that behind the figures, maps and diplomatic speeches lie concrete lives, successive generations
deprived of continuity.
Beyond the work of Ousmane Dia, the exhibition Once Upon a Time in GAZA opens up to a
constellation of invited Palestinian artists, whose works extend and complicate this reflection.
Their presence is neither illustrative nor anecdotal. It constitutes a fundamental axis of the
exhibition, giving voice to artists whose works are born out of the experience of dispossession, exile
and the persistence of life. These artists do not speak of Palestine from a symbolic or conceptual
distance: they speak from Gaza and Palestine, from a fragmented territory subjected to violence and
erasure, but also from a culture deeply rooted in memory, gesture and transmission. Their artistic
practices take many forms—painting, embroidery, calligraphy, installation, photography, drawing,
and archives—which convey the same imperative: to resist erasure and preserve human dignity.
At Maha Aldaya, Palestinian embroidery becomes an intimate cartography of forced displacement.
Each stitch sewn inscribes the memory of a fragmented territory and turns art into an act of
resistance against cultural genocide.
Mohammed Al-Hawajri uses dark humour, satire and metaphor to denounce the absurdity of
colonial violence, while affirming, through colour and irony, a deep attachment to life.
Ahmad Dari, through Arabic lettering and contemporary calligraphy, inscribes Palestine in a long
history of cultural dialogue, where art becomes at once poetic, diplomatic and political language.
Ayman Essa’s female figures, bathed in silent blues, open up spaces for inner contemplation, far
from the spectacle of war.
Raed Issa, for his part, transforms loss — destroyed homes, ruined studios, forced displacement —
into an artistic practice of survival, using makeshift materials to preserve human memory in the
midst of chaos.
Liza Madi explores liminal spaces: ruins, thresholds and domestic fragments, where absence
becomes artistic material and where the work acts as a fragile place of symbolic repair.
With Dina Mattar, Palestinian women appear as a matrix of life, resistance and transmission.
Inspired by nature, traditional embroidery and Islamic art, her work affirms a vision of Gaza that
refuses to be reduced to the image of destruction alone and asserts the right to beauty, hope and
continuity.
May Murad’s practice is part of a reflection on interiority, sensitive memory and the suspended
temporality of Palestinian life. Her works give form to silence, waiting and the invisible traces left
by violence.
Taimaa Salama, for her part, develops a body of work marked by urgency, testimony and the
affirmation of contemporary Palestinian subjectivity, making the creative act a gesture of survival
and presence in the world.
Together, these nine artists compose a sensitive and pluralistic geography of contemporary
Palestine. Their works remind us that Gaza and Palestine are neither numbers nor abstractions, but
inhabited spaces. In Once Upon a Time in Gaza, the Palestinian presence thus affirms an essential
truth: art remains one of the last places where a people can still express themselves, stand tall and
refuse to be erased.
This plurality of Palestinian voices resonates with the approach of Ousmane Dia, whose work is
similarly committed to memory, dignity and the refusal to be erased.
The installation ‘Assise Palestinienne’ (Palestinian Seat) is one of the major themes of Ousmane
Dia’s exhibition. This work reaffirms the historical legitimacy and identity of Palestine by
symbolically restoring its original land. It takes the form of a sculpture whose silhouette faithfully
follows the geographical contours of Palestine, transposed into volume and adapted to the curvature
of the globe.
This spatial translation affirms the permanence of a territory despite political transformations,
imposed borders and repeated attempts at erasure. The fractures, reliefs and irregularities of the
surface materialise the wounds of history, but also the capacity for resistance and resilience.
The surface of the installation is punctuated by vertical steel sculptures, one to three metres high,
constructed from square tubes and topped with chairs. The chair, a recurring motif in Ousmane
Dia’s work, becomes a central symbol here: it evokes human presence, hospitality, waiting, silent
resistance and the fundamental right to sit — and therefore to live — on one’s own land.
The colour palette — white, black, red and green — explicitly references the colours of the
Palestinian flag. These colours structure the space and evoke a shared collective memory, while
placing the work within an immediately recognisable and politically assertive visual language.
« In Memory of the Innocents » is a sculptural installation composed of 365 sculptures, designed as
a temporal and memorial device. Each element refers to a day, emphasising the duration, repetition
and wear and tear of violence. The number becomes a unit of measurement of time lived under
constant threat, but also a fragmented memorial, where each sculpture functions as a silent
presence. Created from the end of October in the artist’s studio in Sandiara, near Mbour, this
installation introduces a processual dimension to the project: the work unfolds over a long period of
time, mirroring the conflict it questions.
The exhibition is explicitly rooted in African political geography. It serves as a reminder that
Senegal, and Africa more broadly, have never been indifferent to the Palestinian question. In 1971,
on the initiative of the Organisation of African Unity, Dakar was the starting point for a mediation
mission to the Middle East led by Presidents Léopold Sédar Senghor, Mobutu, Ahmadou Ahidjo
and Yakubu Gowon. Although this attempt at reconciliation had no lasting effect, it demonstrates
the African continent’s historic commitment to peace and recognition of the Palestinian people. By
recalling this episode, the exhibition affirms that solidarity with Palestine is not a temporary
position, but a deeply rooted political, moral and cultural tradition.
Once Upon a Time in Gaza is neither a neutral observation nor a simple thematic exhibition. It is
an artistic statement, an appeal to the collective conscience. By choosing Dakar as its venue, the
project places Palestine within a global history of struggles, solidarity and resistance, affirming that
art can still – and must – speak out against injustice.
Prof. Babacar Mbaye Diop
Professor of Philosophy, FLSH-UCAD
Director of ISAC
Former Secretary General of the Dakar Biennale
Scientific and artistic curator of the exhibition
