African visions of the US and Europe are on show at the Dakar Biennale

How often does one have the opportunity to see new art from more than 30 African countries, en masse in an African context? Not often enough. That is why Dak/Art 2002 - the fifth biennale of African art in Dakar, which runs until June 10 - has provided so much promise.

As a visitor attending the event the advance programme looked encouraging: a main exhibition of international (African) artists; a salon of African design; three individual exhibitions by invited curators; a homage to popular Senegalese artist Gora Mbengue and a retrospective of 10 years of Dak/Art. In addition, 90 events scattered around the city make up the fringe programme.

First, the good news. There are enough strong works on and off the main programme to indicate that some contemporary art in Africa, in concept at least, is up to the mark. The fact that the work is not strong overall is possibly the result of the extremely erratic nature of the selection process.

On the international exhibition, one of the standout pieces is by Senegalese-born United States-based Modou Dieng. Without showing a single puff of smoke or an American flag, the artist presents the reality of post-September 11 New York City in his Manhattan and Me.

Here are the familiar canyons of Manhattan, black-and-white photo-graphs of the facades of buildings angled upwards. It is a view, though, seen through distinctly African eyes. The facades, no longer bland and uninterrupted, are patched by shards of metal painted in bright colours, squatter-camp style, and newspaper cuttings give context. The cheerful richness of the colours suggests this breaching of the impregnable might have an unexpected upside.

A view of another city - Cairo - is given by Moataz Nasr, one of the prizewinners at last year's Cairo Biennale. His untitled video conveys the teeming nature of this heavily populated city and the struggle for survival of its inhabitants. The format is simple: a camera focused on a rain puddle reflects a succession of faces, gazing downwards. Each time the water becomes still enough to see the face clearly, a foot will splash roughly into the puddle, breaking up the image. This piece won second prize.

Much of the work addresses the military or economic problems of Africa. Another prizewinner is Emeka Udemba of Nigeria. Set outdoors, Udemba's piece is called World White Walls. Wooden frameworks clad with white fabric support two tunnels, which start together but then veer away from each other.

The tunnel on the left has a floor of black soil, planted with hundreds of red plastic roses. On the right, sharp pointed fragments of metal embedded in sand present a dreary view. The path of roses carries an airport arrivals hall-style signboard on the top: US and EU-Citizens. The one on the right says simply: Others.

Near Udemba's piece stands a small metal booth of the type that dispenses lottery tickets to the citizens of Dakar. Here, one can buy a proposed new form of monetary exchange that would unite the continent - the "Afro". Designed as a collaboration between Mansour Ciss of Senegal and Canadian/German artist Baruch Gottlieb, the seven specially designed bills in varying denominations can be bought as a set in a pouch for about R45. A neat riff in this year of the euro.

And what of the South African contingent? Ah, here's the rub. Only Lisa Brice's work stands out. Entitled Walk Easy, her piece continues her theme of the way crime impinges on domestic life in this country. Suspended from six chrome towel rails hang cloths hand-embroidered with the illustrations from a leaflet for a product called Walkeasy - a spray to blind attackers - extolled in the way one might expect to see a new bleach presented. Mirrors behind the towels show the ravelled undersides of the cloths.

Continuing his dissection of the nature of the city of Johannesburg, Rodney Place shows an installation entitled Bread City. Projected on to a screen strung between two pillars is a repeated image of a man crawling towards the viewer, picking up scraps from the ground. On the wall opposite hangs Place's designer gear for the newcomer to the city: a tunic printed with images of city centre buildings and flyover maps, and pants with road signs. Above each outfit hangs a head shot of a different man, coming from a different African country. Donovan Ward shows two small and nondescript canvases on the subject of race classification, and then there is Bruce Clark. Bruce who?

The tale of how Bruce Clark came to represent South Africa sums up the curatorial weakness of the show. Brice and Ward were invited by the central selection committee that dealt with the international contingent. Place found out about the forthcoming biennale through an e-mail, and submitted work, which was subsequently selected. Clark, who is British, had made work that pleased the committee - illustrative paintings on the subject of genocide - but not being African, didn't qualify for selection, until the committee discovered his parents were South African but had emigrated to the United Kingdom before Clark's birth. Problem solved.

Regrettably, the conferences and gatherings that were part of the programme were badly organised and conducted almost entirely in French with limited translation facilities. In the atmosphere of general mediocrity, the question kept on coming up of when, or if, the next Johannesburg Biennale, seen as legendary and of enormous significance on the African continent, would take place. Since Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Ben Ngubane is quoted in the latest issue of Sawubona as saying: "The soul of any nation lives in its arts and culture," perhaps it is time that the subject is raised again, at ministerial level. Seriously.