Roots

Kine Aw

Honoring International Women’s Month, March 2021, aKAZ! presents the work of renowned Senegalese artist Kiné Aw in an exhibition entitled Celebrating Roots. This exhibition is the result of another partnership with Gallery Miriam. In this exhibit, Kiné Aw celebrates Senegalese women’s contributions to History, Culture and Society. Women are the ROOTS of African society and indeed the fundament of all human endeavor.

Kiné comes from a long line of Senegalese female creative geniuses which includes the novelist Mariama Bâ and her novel So Long a Letter. Both Mariama Bâ and Kiné Aw graphically outline the tension between the traditional and the ‘modern’ for African women navigating their multiple lives in pluralistic settings and in many communities, each of which require a different skill set. Women in Senegal hold tremendous power in some aspects of communal life and in other ways their agency is severely hampered often in the ways in which traditional norms and values do not translate optimally to 'modern' urban settings. In the city, due largely to physical space limitations, large communal families splinter into nuclear families. A nuclear family setting changes the role of co-wives from an often collaborative relationship to one steeped in competition.