Sitor Senghor shows him wearing a white button-down shirt and round glasses, standing against a textured grayish wall, looking directly at the camera with a calm and confident expression; the image is credited to photographer Antoine Tempé.” width=”970″ height=”869″ data-caption=’Sitor Senghor has been plans for AKAA and the market for African art in Paris. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>© Antoine Tempé, courtesy AKAA and Sitor Senghor</span>’>
Sitor Senghor was recently named art director of the Paris-based October art fair AKAA—Also Known as Africa—for its 2025 edition, coinciding with its 10th anniversary. Founded by art historian Victoria Mann as a platform for artists from the continent, it draws about thirty-something galleries per year to the Carreau du Temple, a rehabilitated 19th-century structure in the Haut Marais. A small regional alternative to the behemoth that is Art Basel Paris, AKAA was founded to showcase contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora and to develop the fragile contemporary African art market in France, which is still hampered by its colonial past.
Senghor has big ambitions for the fair—to increase its prestige and visibility, stabilize the African art market in France and elevate the fair’s artist selection. When we spoke with him, he elaborated on the way the perception of Paris is changing, his admiration of the African art fair 1-54 and his own peripatetic background.
You worked for a long time outside of the art world… how did you pivot to art?
I was a banker for eighteen years, specializing in aircraft financing in the Middle East—I was based between London and Dubai. Because you’re so close to the rulers, you end up doing private banking. When you’re talking about private banking, you’re also talking about alternative wealth management, including art. I left banking because it became complicated with all the mergers inside the banks and the fighting between the teams. After eighteen years, I said, that’s enough.
Before that, was art part of your life?
I was raised in Brazil, then in Italy; I was surrounded by Brazilian design in the ‘60s, and then I was in Rome, the city of art—but it was the worst years of the Red Brigades [an Italian Marxist–Leninist armed terrorist group]. As the son of an ambassador, we were pretty much at home or at friends’ homes. My friends, at the time, were all children of the Roman aristocracy who went to French school, and when you’re playing at those houses, they’re full of artwork. So even though I didn’t study art, I’ve always been surrounded by it. At home, there was this family tradition of having African art on the walls. My great uncle, the former President of Senegal, Léopold [Sédar Senghor], always did a lot for art; wherever he was traveling to, all the state visits were accompanied by exhibitions of Senegalese artists.
How did you transition from being an admirer of art to overseeing artists?
When I left the bank, I worked with two partners—one architect and another former banker—in the south of France, in Ramatuelle, next to St. Tropez. We were doing architecture, interior design and running a gallery; we had more than 1,000-square-meter space. I started calling some of the artists I knew to exhibit them. When I stopped that and came back to Paris, I started working by myself as a gallerist, renting spaces to exhibit and participating in 1-54 in London, New York and Marrakech. I knew Touria El Glaoui, and when she founded 1-54, we talked about it. I’d attended the first edition of 1-54 in London as a guest, and I really loved it. The following year, I decided to exhibit as a gallerist, and that’s how it started. I also participated in a drawing fair in Paris. I stopped in 2018 because I was financially strained.
I joined a gallery next to the Picasso Museum; it was owned by a Czech investment fund. Everybody was in Prague, but they needed a director in Paris. Orbis Pictus specialized in modern art, and they wanted to exhibit Czech Surrealists. It didn’t make much sense. Apart from being snobby about buying in Paris, all the artwork was going back to Prague. Gradually, we changed the gallery into something more contemporary. For the owners, it was mainly a real estate investment. They decided last year to stop it and bring the funds back to Prague, because they lost a lot of money in other investments.
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In 2024, I dedicated myself to two things: One was a Lee Miller exhibition tied to the liberation of Saint-Malo [in Brittany] within the framework of its 80th anniversary. The other was during the Biennale in Venice: with a friend, we transformed her apartment in the Giardini into a collector’s space. I curated the show, and there were all sorts of African artworks. We were inviting journalists and collectors, people could just stop by for a coffee or a drink, going out of the Giardini, going to Arsenale. This was the first step of something we wanted to do yearly in Venice.
AKAA is going into its 10th year. How closely had you been following the fair prior to this new position? As the artistic director, what is your vision for the anniversary edition?
I’ve been to all the editions. I’ve been very clear with Victoria [Mann, founder of AKAA] about what was wrong with the fair. AKAA was not at the right level; that’s not necessarily due to Victoria and her previous team. It’s more related to the difference between a French structure and an Anglo-Saxon structure. The African contemporary market is perfectly structured in London and has been since the beginning. In London, you have this very strong Nigerian and Ghanaian diaspora, and they’ve always been very helpful with their artists; they know how to structure a market, and they did so, and that benefited the entire African market.
From the beginning, 1-54 positioned itself with a very strict selection. What I would like to do with AKAA is to put it at the right level. I want people to stop saying stupid things like, Oh, but this is expensive for an African artist. I want to stop the ignorance of some collectors about Africa, and I also want to stop the attitude of a lot of French-speaking African artists who put themselves in an inferior position. I want them to be proud of what they’re doing. And to do that, I want a stricter selection of the galleries and the artwork. There will be a new selection committee—we were at the end, anyway, of the term of the existing committee. It’s good that it’s changing now, and we will be appointing people who are more focused on the market. I don’t want to be just on the market side, but at the end of the day, it’s an art fair. We have to sell for the galleries, for the artists, for us, and if we succeed in doing that well, people will come.
It’s not that I want to select only top galleries or top artists. There will always be room for emerging artists, but they have to be good emerging artists. It’s not just that we take anyone doing African art. It will be strict.
Can you elaborate on some of the criteria that distinguish that “level”—how do you determine a certain caliber?
I don’t want artists who do things because the market wants that type of thing. I don’t want copies of Basquiat at a lower level. I want true identities. I want some of the big galleries that are not at AKAA. For example, Perrotin—he doesn’t have African artists, but he’s at Art Basel and he’s also at Asia Now. It doesn’t cost him much to have an additional stand at Asia Now while he’s spending a fortune at the Grand Palais. I want to do the same with some galleries with African artists. They might not show their African artists at Basel because they want to promote more expensive and bankable artists, but it wouldn’t cost them much to have a focus at AKAA. And bringing these galleries—some, the space is limited anyway—could trigger better collectors and really a better understanding of the market.
Which galleries do you want to attract?
Templon, Nathalie Obadia, Semiose. I spoke with some of them in Venice. Let’s see if that works or not.
The good thing is that Paris has really changed. The feeling outsiders have of Paris, because of the Olympics and because of Notre Dame… the focus is back. Brexit did a lot of harm, but Paris is the European capital of art, so we should really try to make the best of it. Just changing Paris+ par Art Basel into Art Basel Paris did a lot. The number of collectors in Paris last year for Basel was amazing. So if we could try to benefit from that… we can work with Basel. Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I think it’s achievable.
Of the galleries that you cited, why is there a hesitance to participate? Like you said, a gallery can show in multiple places.
They never really considered AKAA a serious fair because of the lack of artistic direction—because they were mixing too many things that were contradictory. It wasn’t positioned the right way. It started well; it was great to have in Paris. The first edition had this fantastic installation from [Algerian artist] Rachid Koraïchi. Then it went downhill—the second edition is always difficult—then it went up again. Year after year, it was more consistent, with fewer bad galleries but fewer good galleries. It cannot continue like that. We need some names to attract collectors.
We need to support galleries from the continent, in particular those with travel restrictions. Last year, two galleries couldn’t come. They had paid everything, but they didn’t get the right visas, which is just appalling. So we will be working on that, too, to help the galleries from the continent as much as we can, those who we think deserve to be in a fair like this.
You yourself are a collector. What are your proclivities?
I bought a lot when I was a banker, mostly African modern art, which has been a little bit forgotten because they just were not there when the market developed. But then I’ve been buying French or English art, mainly portraits. I love drawings, and I love photography. Drawing, for me, is the essence of art—a perfect drawing or even a sketch is something I adore; this came from the Italian tradition of the masters. I keep buying emerging artists who are affordable for me; I try to help. But what I’m doing a lot is buying art books: books made in Japan with particular paper, art books in limited editions…
My apartment is full of Brazilian design, full of things that I have inherited from my family—but things I will never sell. It’s not an investment for me. It’s really because I like living surrounded by that. What really drives everything I do is beauty.
You were speaking earlier about the way the English market is structured. By comparison, how do you situate the lags in the French market?
The French market… this has to do with the French approach to money. French people don’t like to talk about money; art, for them, is something cultural. It’s for everyone. So they will never talk about the prices they paid for an artwork, which is a kind of schizophrenic approach. They will tell you that they bought something from a big gallery—so obviously you know what the price will be—but they will not tell you the price per se.
If you look at the French African artists, the prices are not consistent. But if you take most of the Anglo-Saxon African artists, it is structured. It’s a true market. This is something that has happened in London with Sotheby’s, with Bonhams, and with the way people consider art. In France, it’s complicated to organize that. Maybe with the help of auction houses, it can be done. In France, we have to try to think less about the cultural side of art and more about the market side because, at the end of the day in France, most of the artists are subsidized. The Ministry of Culture helps a lot, which is fantastic, but then the artists think first of what can be given to them to work, rather than trying to do things by themselves. That’s really the difference. Maybe it’s too ambitious to try to change that, but we have to help the best we can, maybe by bringing some more Anglo-Saxon artists to the fair or Anglo-Saxon collectors—that’s what I will try to do. Even the selection committee will be more Anglo-Saxon.
