The East Africa Art Biennale — EASTAFAB — is the continuing biennial of contemporary art from across the East African Community, founded in January 2003 in Dar es Salaam by the Belgian-born curator and artist Yves Goscinny and Prof. Elias Jengo of the University of Dar es Salaam, and registered that month with the Tanzanian National Council of Arts (BASATA Serial No 1950) as a non-profit, non-governmental and non-commercial association. The institution is headquartered at the University of Dar es Salaam's Department of Fine and Performing Arts, where Prof. Jengo — who co-founded the department (originally the Department of Arts, Music and Theatre, today Fine and Performing Arts) with the Tanzanian painter and diplomat Sam Joseph Ntiro in March 1975 — serves as the Biennale's chairman; Goscinny, who had organised the first Art in Tanzania survey in 1998 and opened his own gallery in East Africa in 2002, has served as Executive Director since the founding. The first edition opened in 2003 at the Tanzania National Museum in Dar es Salaam, with work primarily by artists from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda; subsequent editions have widened the participating geography to include Rwanda, Burundi and, intermittently, artists from Ethiopia and other neighbouring states, with the regional National Committees in Bujumbura, Kampala, Kigali and Nairobi responsible for selecting the artists exhibiting from their own countries.
The announced 11th edition, Common Grounds, New Horizons: Reimagining East African Futures, marks the institution's return after a multi-year hiatus and — if it holds in its announced form — the strongest argument the programme has yet made for a primary venue outside Tanzania: the Nairobi National Museum has been named as the central exhibition hub from 15 September to 20 November 2026, with a network of Kenyan partner venues — the GoDown Arts Centre, Nairobi Gallery and Railway Museum, Kuona Trust and Circle Art Gallery — programmed alongside satellite exhibitions in Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Kigali and Bujumbura. The institutional caveat is material: in a February 2026 public notice the National Museums of Kenya distanced the Nairobi National Museum from the announced biennale, stating that EASTAFAB 2026 organisers had used the museum's name in their promotional material without consent and that the museum is "not associated with or involved in the event in any capacity." The 2026 theme, announced in early 2026 by the East Africa Art Biennale Association together with regional partners, asks participating artists to address shared regional questions — urbanisation and the changing East African city, environmental resilience, cultural memory and the encounter between heritage and digital practice — and the programme as announced is to be structured around a working ecosystem that includes curator training, artist residencies and community workshops alongside the principal exhibition.
An institution carried by two people and a department
The structural feature that distinguishes EASTAFAB from the older and better-known African biennials — DAK'ART in Senegal, the Bamako Encounters in Mali, the discontinued Johannesburg Biennale of the 1990s and the state-run Egyptian biennials in Cairo and Alexandria — is the modesty and the intimacy of its institutional architecture. The biennale association is registered as a non-profit dependent for funds on grants, donations and sponsorships from national and international partners; the headquarters are not a freestanding office but a university department; the founding artistic and administrative leadership has rested for two decades on the working partnership of Goscinny, a Belgian curator and artist who arrived in Tanzania through international-organisation postings and stayed, and Jengo, the senior Tanzanian painter whose career — from Makerere University in the 1960s through the founding of the UDSM Department of Arts, Music and Theatre (today Fine and Performing Arts) in 1975 to the chair of the National Arts Council of Tanzania and the founding board chair of Nafasi Art Space in 2008 — is the institutional memory of the modern Tanzanian art scene. The biennale's editions have therefore travelled with the available means: the first two editions were anchored in Dar es Salaam alone; the 5th edition in 2011–12 was the first to take the exhibition across East Africa by road, opening at Dar es Salaam in November 2011 before being transported successively to Arusha (the East African Community headquarters) in January 2012, Nairobi in February, Kampala in March, Kigali in April and Bujumbura in May. The 8th edition in 2017–18, titled Moving Arts Across East African Borders, took the same logic further, opening at Dar es Salaam in November 2017 and continuing to Arusha and Nairobi across the following months.
The institutional argument is that even modest infrastructure — a single university department, a continuing curatorial partnership, a working network of national committees in the five East African capitals, and the goodwill of the regional cultural institutions that have hosted the touring exhibitions — can sustain a continuing regional contemporary art platform across two decades. The 2026 edition, with its primary venue at the Nairobi National Museum and its satellite footprint across the five East African Community countries, is the institutional demonstration that the argument continues to hold.
