"Without Negotiation" (2018)
Video: 9 min 36 sec
In this project, the artist explores Dakar’s dusty downtown streets, crowded with hustlers and traders. This group is made up of a myriad of nationalities and social backgrounds, where students and unemployed graduates intermingle with illiterates and refugees. Practicing the art of survival, the ingenious vendors reinvent new ways of selling their goods daily. Circulating through the city by taxi and accepting any offer made to him, the artist exposes how this shadow economy, inherent to nearly all industries, intersects with the art world, where the concept of an informal economy and the art of negotiation is not foreign to anyone involved.
The work of Younes Baba-Ali mixes technology, objects, sound, video, and photography with political, social, and ecological issues in places where art is not commonly found.
/ Photo credit: Kristīne Madjare / Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art