Viye Diba
Visual artist
Born in 1954
project: [CAURIS]

Viye Diba has been a professor of art education for 25 years. He was educated first at the Ecole normale superieure d'education artistique (ENSEA) before pursuing environmental research at the Ecole Pilote internationale d'art et de recherche de la Villa Arson in Nice, and at the Université de Nice. At Université, he wrote a Ph.D. thesis in urban geography entitled " Salubrite et esthetique urbaine", a comparative study of Nice and Dakar.

He presently works as professor of visual arts at the ENBA. Since 1989, he has been president of the National Senegalese Association of Visual Artists (ANAPS), and is a member of the Scientific Commission at the Biennale de Dakar.

Since 1985, he has taken part in numerous national and international exhibitions, such as the Salons nationaux, the Biennales de Dakar, and "Environnement temoin culturel", a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Dakar in 1990. Internationally, he has participated in several large-scale events, including the Biennale d'Abidjan in 1993, the Johannesburgh Biennale from 1995 to 1997, an international exhibition around installation containers in Copenhagen in 1996, and a duo show with Mustapha Dime at the Centre d'art contemporain de Bruxelles in 1997, etc. He received the Premier prix Leopold Sedar Senghor during the 1998 edition of the Biennale de Dakar.

His work is articulated around the the valorization of local materials (traditional cotton fabric, scraps of printed fabric, etc). Today his research places emphasis on the importance of local materials and their manipulation to the development of a process where the act of manufacturing becomes more important than that of painting in the classic sense of the term.

The difference between sculpture and painting is erased to create an orginal combination inherent to the African tradition. The overall relations between materials is encapsulated in what Viya Diba calls the concept of KANGOUROU, which means "promiximity, affinity, and complicity between materials"

Email :
viye@hotmail.com