Fatou Kandé Senghor

Fatou Kandé Senghor is an artist and filmmaker who produces documentaries, television shows and fiction. She also trains young students and youth with learning difficulties in video-making. Her documentary film entitled Giving Birth, which portrays the enigmatic Casamance-based sculptor Seyni Awa Camara, was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015. She has published several essays discussing gender, urban cultures and African cinema. Kandé Senghor is the founder of Waru Studio, an arts center that brings together young artists, filmmakers and researchers to explore the nexus between art, technology and politics in Africa. In 2015, she published WALABOK, An Oral History of Hip Hop in Senegal (Amalion Publishing). The publication is an anthology of two generations of artists that make up the hip hop movement in Senegal. It serves as a basis for a television series that deals with Senegales youth through the lens of hip hop; tackling both the ills and positive aspects of our society. Kandé Senghor’s artistic practice combines photography, film, public installations, writing and research in which she explores intimate concepts such as identity, community, religion, history and geography. Her primary passion is documenting social transformation in order to better reveal how perceived sacred texts, poetry and the legends of oral tradition inform modern life. Kandé Senghor likes to blur the dichotomy between ancestral heritage and religious practice (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) in order to challenge and complicate expectations and stereotypes. She lives and works in Thiès.