Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in collaboration with Associazione Genesi, presents CONTINENTE ARTE, a solo exhibition by Adji Dieye. The project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Fondazione and the Associazione, which began in 2023 with a group exhibition in Alba and continued in 2024 with a solo show by the artist Binta Diaw at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, confirming the two institutions' shared commitment to supporting and promoting the new generations of Italian artists active on the national and international scene.
On this occasion, Adji Dieye presents new productions ranging from video installation to sculptural installation, continuing her research into the relationships between architecture, archives, public representation and the construction of national and post-colonial identities.
The title of the exhibition, CONTINENTE ARTE (“Continent Art”), alludes to a tension that has long run through the contemporary cultural system: the tension between the artwork and the geographical, historical and identity-related context from which it originates. All too often, in fact, the “continent” — understood not merely as a geographical place but as a set of cultural, ethnic and political affiliations — ends up prevailing over the art itself, becoming the dominant interpretative key through which the work is observed, narrated and evaluated. The exhibition stems precisely from this reflection, questioning the mechanisms that turn the artist's identity into a narrative device capable, at times, of obscuring the complexity of the work.
At the heart of the project is a new two-channel video installation that reflects on the concept of artistic freedom and on the devices through which contemporary art is made visible, narrated and rendered “comprehensible” in the public sphere. The two videos share the same setting: a television studio dedicated to the sale of artworks, staged as a traditional teleshopping set. The works presented are the same, as is the artist called upon to intervene within the narrative. What changes are the protagonists tasked with promoting and selling them to the public.
Through different registers, the two teleshopping hosts, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Alessandro Orlando, construct discourses that attribute value to the works by relying almost exclusively on elements external to their actual formal and conceptual complexity. Attention focuses on the artist's geographical origin, on the stereotypes associated with artists of African descent, and on the audience's expectations regarding certain identity-related and social themes, to the point of turning the artwork into a kind of pretext for confirming already familiar narratives. Teleshopping thus becomes a metaphor for the processes of cultural mediation that accompany contemporary art, calling into question the role of critics, curators, institutions, the media and the market in the construction of the meaning and value of artworks.
Alongside the video installation, the exhibition presents a series of new sculptures composed of metal structures evoking unstable towers, precarious architectures and constructions on the verge of collapse. Traversed and clad in textile elements, these works evoke the fragility of the historical and identity-related narratives that accompanied the colonial and post-colonial era, suggesting an image of an ever-provisional balance between memory, belonging and transformation.
The project thus invites us to ask who constructs the meaning of artworks, which narratives are privileged and which, instead, remain unheard.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication conceived as an artist's book, produced for the occasion.
Biografia
Adji Dieye (1991) lives and works between Milan and Dakar. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the construction of national epistemologies within public and institutional contexts. Through archives, architecture, advertising imagery and media devices, her work questions the paradoxes running through the idea of progress and the forms through which it is represented and internalised. Her work has been presented, among others, at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (2024), Fotomuseum Winterthur (solo exhibition, 2023), Fondation H (solo exhibition, 2023), C/O Berlin (solo exhibition, 2021), Biennale de Lyon (2022), Dak'Art Biennale (2022), Rencontres de Bamako (2022), Foam (2020) and Kunsthalle Wien (2020).
