Benkum Art
← Works

Steady Without Me

A Senegalese woman in a bright orange boubou and headwrap stands still and upright, seen side-on, one hand resting on a low unfinished wall of grey cement blocks, in a pale limestone field between rising khaki panels like half-built walls.

This room isn’t finished yet. I already am.

See it in your space

The walls around me aren’t finished. I am.

On September 12, 2026, the Youth Olympic flame — lit two days earlier at Athens’ Panathenaic Stadium — arrived in Senegal, escorted by one hundred Senegalese women in bright orange boubous to Place du Souvenir, where it lit a cauldron for the first Olympic event ever held on African soil. “This flame tells us that Africa is no longer watching; Africa is welcoming,” President Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye said, as the flame began a six-week relay through all fourteen of the country’s regions before the Games, due to open on October 31.

Let the walls catch up. I already know exactly where I’m standing.