It takes eight hours to fly to Dakar by South African Airways whether you come from Johannesburg or New York. This is symbolic of its positioning halfway between an African and a first world city which manages the rare feat of combining the best of both worlds. The Biennale named 'Dak'art' this year celebrated its seventh event.

This exposition was established in 1992, skipped 1994 and has taken place every 2 years since, making it Africa's most sustainable Biennale, becoming one of the most important on the international calendar. Some of the world's most influential dealers, collectors, art critics, journalists, curators and artists met in Dakar this May to view the 87 works on display on the main show and over 120 fringe events in and around the city. The growth in international interest is in part attributed to the fact that previously collectors (mainly American and French) concentrated on 'tribal' art but, with the scarcity of such works on the international market and other related factors, contemporary African art collecting has now become the sexy new trend.

I was invited to be on the jury with five others from Senegal, England, America and India. We all arrived on May 1, finding ourselves in the midst of the Workers' Day Parade through the city. What a spectacle! Various groups had got together and colour co-ordinated their outfits. Senegalese people must be among the most beautiful in the world. Everyone looks like a supermodel and seems to be at least 6 ft tall with an innate sense of grace and style. The march-past started off in a sea of white outfits, followed by bright pink, pale blue, green and yellow floor-length outfits with matching soaring turbans providing a rainbow spectacle of peace and pageantry perfectly fitting for a country with socialist ideals.

Dakar is a city with a fascinating mix of French and African and the roadside kiosks and stalls reflect this, showing brightly coloured swathes of imaginatively patterned fabric. Little Nescafé trolleys on bikes with gas boilers where coffee could be purchased on the spot populate the city. You often encounter someone quietly pulling out a prayer mat and facing East at prayer time, and a peek into a patisserie is equal to anything on a Parisian street. Like most African cities, lots of 'guides' are ready to take you to the nearest bargain and earn a few quick bucks.

The walk through the city led us to the National Museum which is housed in an Art Deco building set in park-like gardens. Like most of the elegant buildings in the city, it was built during the French colonial days and, like a graceful old lady, is suffering from wear and tear. However, paintbrushes and ladders indicated the work being done in readiness for the exhibition which was opening later that week. This had all started somewhat late as funding had been delayed leading to all sorts of problems with participants' airtickets, arrival of artworks and general maintenance. But large scale exhibitions always seem to suffer from these problems and the fact that many artworks arrived at 8pm on Thursday night was a cause for concern. The President of Senegal was opening the show at 9.30am on Friday morning and prizes had to be announced then.

This led to the judging process happening from about midnight on Thursday til the early hours of Friday morning when we handed in the final list to the organisers on the heels of the President's arrival. No-one in the audience of several thousand suspected the hidden dramas, and the event went ahead with great pomp and ceremony. However, many works were not installed in time to be considered for judging and unfortunately a few South African entries suffered from this. Many works were still being installed as the viewers walked through the galleries on Friday morning. This was most regrettable for both the artists concerned and the show as a whole.

Eight commissioners from various areas were tasked with choosing artists who were all considered African although many of them lived on other continents and sometimes had a tenuous relationship with Africa. This gives a different flavour from the one overall curator which has been the case in recent biennales in other cities. However I felt that the overall exhibition suffered somewhat from a lack of curation which could have pulled together a theme which was rather obscured by a haphazard placement of individual works. This theme was 'Afrique: Entendus, Sous-entendues et Malentendus' officially, and perhaps loosely, translated as 'Africa: Agreements, Allusions and Misunderstandings'.

A remarkable feature was the number of video installations, making up at least a quarter of the exhibition, refuting the stereotypical image of African creation being mainly sculpture and painting. There was also a notable absence of photography which is currently one of the most prominent media in contemporary art. This may have been due to the selectors' preferences or perhaps the recent Bamako Photography Biennale. However, to accept that a separate Biennale takes care of photography on the continent is a disturbing thought when art practice seems now more than ever about dissolving boundaries.

The artists selected as South African representatives were Churchill Madikida, Berni Searle, Wim Botha, Robin Rhode, Andrew Tshabangu and Colbert Mashile who together formed a strong contingent and whose works attracted much favourable comment and interest.

Memory and identity were key ideas throughout the show. The main prize-winner was Moroccan artist, mounir fatmi, a well established international artist, who submitted a video and mixed media installation Getting out of History about the Black Panthers, the revolutionary 60s American black consciousness group. Fatmi's work comprised video, photographs, documents and related objects resulting in a well-thought out, intelligent and coherent revision of a sometimes forgotten aspect of African history and an attempt to bring it back to the continent of Africa.

Angolan artist, Claudio Christavao was also a prize-winner for her video installation Fata Morgana, an exploration of memory and the relationship of many people who had left Angola and other colonies at the time of independence in the early 1970s with their parents, and are now interrogating how and why they considered themselves African. Fata Morgana is another term for 'mirage' which is also the title and content of the first video of the installation. But mirages are precisely the images we see because we so strongly want to see them. Moreover, the closer you get to a mirage, the less clear it becomesÖ Surrounding small, intimate screens with the individual stories, a large projection lures the viewer: images from a colonial ghost-town from the early 20th century, slowly being swallowed by the desert. This interior space is at once the background and projection of all the memories described.

Another notable prize-winner was Kenyan painter Joseph Bertiers, whose cynical and densely peopled narrative paintings remind one of a contemporary Breughel. His works fall into a specific genre of popular African painting and make cutting comments on everyday life and morality. There were several other prizes many of which fell into specific categories such as being Francophone, working in the medium of painting or sculpture, living in Senegal, exhibiting for the first time on this biennale etc. These categories were not made known at the prizegiving and certainly made our task as jurors complex. However, a great bonus this year was the presence of 14 representatives from the Res Artis network - an organisation which links residencies around the globe and they each chose one artist to whom they awarded a residency, swelling the prizes considerably.

The 100+ fringe or 'Off' shows also drew great interest and it was impossible to get to them all in the few days I had. However, those I did see gave me a good overview of a thriving contemporary art scene in Dakar where international buyers are currently showing great interest. There are some good contemporary galleries in the city and some funky and interesting alternative spaces such as the hairdressing salon owned by a woman who was a psychologist in France when she visited Dakar some 10 years ago, fell in love with the city, threw up her practice and became a hairdresser cum gallerist, establishing a thriving business.

Stories abound of visitors to the city who subsequently gave up their established lives and settled there. There's a magic in Dakar which is intensified in Goree Island where Breyten Breytenbach has a home and where Jan Jordaan established a printmaking studio. There's also a judge who became a jeweller and who makes exquisite jewellery in a pink house above a museum in which well known Senagalese artist, Ndary Lo had set up an installation. A little further down the road we visited the studio of Moustapha Dime (now deceased) where Gabrielle Kemzo Malou now works. This is set on a cliff in an ancient weathered building where the sea below gently washes over the rocky shore. He showed an installation which looked like a shipwreck in the water and which was meant to remind the viewer of the importance of Goree which was the last stopping point for slaves headed from Africa to the Americas.

'Dak'art' is firmly established on the international circuit and, despite many logistic and funding problems, the organisers pulled it off with aplomb ensuring that the event will remain one which is a 'must-see' showcase of contemporary African art. It was with regret that I left Dakar after a fascinating visit where the city's art, hospitality and grace will remain with me for a long time.

DakíArt 2006 runs from May 5 to June 5.

Carol Brown is the director of the Durban Art Gallery