In conjunction with this year’s Fotografia Europea festival, titled Ghosts of the Moment, Collezione Maramotti is presenting the first solo show in Italy by Parisian artist Ndayé Kouagou. It brings together recent works and others made specifically for the exhibition, including a new project inspired by the narrative device of photo comics.

Kouagou’s creative practice, which moves between visual art and performance and is often inhabited by the artist’s alter ego, hinges on language. The texts that he authors – which seem familiar, muddled and tongue-in-cheek, all at once – are the catalyst at the core of videos, installations and live exhibitions 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 avoid 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.

In a disorienting narrative experience that is both playful and existential, the artist leads visitors through a journey with no destination, where the landmarks seem hazy or even completely illogical.

His works prompt a meditation on truth (real, potential or imaginary), vulnerability, unease and power dynamics, probing the intricate contradictions of our subjective reality and the paradoxes of today’s world.