Heaven's truth

In conjunction with Festival Fotografia Europea 2026, titled Ghosts of the Moment, Collezione is presenting Heaven’s truth: the first solo exhibition in Italy by the French artist Ndayé Kouagou, it brings together recent pieces and a sequence of works made specifically for the occasion.

Kouagou’s ambitious new project, which also lends its title to the show and occupies the first few rooms, is inspired by the narrative device of photo comics; it includes a video, three-dimensional elements and wall pieces.
The video, divided into three chapters, is the central, theatrical work from which the others spring. The artist himself introduces a set of characters caught up in a simple story of life and death, leading viewers through the adventures of four universal “types.” The fates of these figures—canine and human, physically masked and psychologically exposed archetypes of the Western world—intertwine with the narrator’s own, in a hypothetical Heaven that mirrors the dynamics of the earthly world and is subject to the intricate dilemmas of Judgement.

The rooms that follow present a number of works from the last few years that served as a point of departure for the new project Heaven’s truth.
The video Here & Elsewhere (2024) dramatizes what the artist himself calls a “message for everybody.” The story alternates fictitious live news reports with paradoxical dissertations in which a modern-day aidos, who has the artist’s body and a woman’s voice, ends up imparting guru-like declarations and advice to a perturbed audience.
In the body of works revolving around Kouagou’s video A coin is a coin (2022) ‒ already in the Collezione Maramotti archive ‒ the artist performs an allegorical monologue that challenges our perception and understanding of reality. Starting off with abstract conceptual observations about the two sides of a coin, Kouagou manipulates the viewer’s beliefs and prejudices, posing questions to himself and us about power and the true meaning of freedom.

Kouagou’s creative practice, which ranges between visual art and performance and is often inhabited by the artist’s alter ego, is born out of language. The texts he creates – which seem familiar, jumbled and sardonic, all at the same time – become the catalyst and core of videos, installations and live appearances that gradually yet forcefully reveal the instability of language, the opacity of words, and the shifts in meaning that are intrinsic to communication in the media and among individuals. Through dialogues, monologues, questions and statements that elude any clear definition of their own subject, Kouagou touches deep chords in the conscious and unconscious mind, exploring individual and collective choices and attitudes toward the world.