still active today and has acquired an international reputation across and outside the continent.10 Its specificity is its focus on photography and video in Africa. Unlike the events aforementioned, the Biennale de Bamako has been driven and organized from its beginnings by the French cultural exchange agency Institut français (formerly AFAA, cultural branch of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture in Mali. Therefore, curator Simon Njami qualifies the Biennale de Bamako as a “transplanted” event, which required work on a local scale to legitimize the biennial that could first be seen as a neocolonial event serving foreign purposes.11 It certainly succeeded to gain a local as well as an international renown because it boosted the creation of photography based festivals such as the PhotoFesta Maputo (2002)12, the Gwanza Month of Photography (2009)13, or the Lagos Photo Festival (2010)14 just to name a few. Johannesburg Biennale Founded to celebrate the end of Apartheid and the reopening of the country to the world after decades of boycott, the Johannesburg Biennale, despite its short life (only two editions: Africus in 1995 and Trade Routes in 1997), is one of the best examples of the fundamental tension into which biennials are caught: to settle into the local and to gain renown on an international level. If for curator Hans Ulrich Obrist the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale was as important as the Venice Biennale or documenta X held the same year, and was amongst the most influential exhibitions of the 1990s, 15 the local reception of the event was in general radically different. Its absence of engagement with the South African communities and the conceptual and elitist character of the exhibited artworks were harshly criticized in the local press. The biennial was thus seen as a grafted event, serving political interests rather than social and cultural ones, and favoring an international art discourse over a local one. In the case of the Johannesburg Biennale this criticism was one of the pretexts of the Greater Johannesburg City Council to withdraw its support and shut down the event prematurely. Even though the reasons for its cancellation are still not fully elucidated, the Johannesburg Biennale remains nonetheless a mythical biennial because, after decades of isolation due to international boycott, it shed light on the South African art scene and helped many South Africans artists to access the international arena where they are