when art biennials started to be seen as the best 'invention' to promote local art and reach a global audience. History Egypt was the first country on the African continent to use the art biennial format as a political tool for national promotion, long before art biennials became a trend in the 1990s and dawned all over the continent, especially since the beginning of the 21st century. The Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries was founded in 1955 and celebrated its 26th edition in 2016, as for the Cairo International Biennale, it was created in 1984 and organized its last edition in 2012. Initially devoted to Arab contemporary art, Cairo opened up to the international scene from its 1986's edition. But while Egypt was a precursor, its biennials are less known abroad than other ones held on the continent. This situation can be explained by the provincial focus (despite the international openness of the Cairo biennial) and classical style of the two events (built on the Venice Biennale model of national pavilions), combined to the fact that they are state-run events, locked in a national paradigm and with barely any communication tools (neither of them has an official website). Recently, in November 2015, Something Else OFF Biennale Cairo, an artist-run initiative, came into being in order to promote the Egyptian contemporary art scene that is mostly excluded from the Alexandria and Cairo events. The very name of this independent biennial says clearly that its aim is to take a step back from the establishment and give an alternative view of the Egyptian creation. One common preconception on African art biennials is to situate the Dakar Biennale or Dak'art as the first sub-Saharan art biennial whereas it was preceded by the Biennale d'art bantou contemporain (or Biennial of Contemporary Bantu Art), founded in 1985. The latter is less covered abroad than DAK'ART, and it lasted for only seven editions (the last one being in 2002). The originality of the project is its creation as part of a more ambitious cultural project initiated by Gabonese President Omar Bongo in 1982: the CICIBA (International Centre of Bantu Civilizations), an intergovernmental project which aimed at preserving and promoting Bantu cultures, seen by the organizers as sharing a homogeneous cultural base whereas they were at that time estimated to represent more than 150 million people dispersed among more than twenty countries. Therefore, the biennial was conceived