Cette première monographie de Ndayé Kouagou rend compte de la réflexion que mène l'artiste français sur le langage, la perception et l'instabilité du sens à travers les registres visuels et performatifs.
This volume accompanies Heaven's truth, the first solo exhibition in Italy by the French artist Ndayé Kouagou at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia. Bringing together recent works alongside a sequence of pieces developed specifically for the occasion, the project extends Kouagou's ongoing investigation into language, perception, and the instability of meaning across visual and performative registers. At the core of the exhibition lies a new ambitious project that also gives the show its title and unfolds in its opening rooms. Drawing on the narrative structure of photo comics, it brings together video, sculptural elements, and wall-based works into a single dramaturgical constellation. The central piece, a three-chapter video, operates as a theatrical engine from which the surrounding works emerge. Here, the artist introduces a cast of characters caught in a deceptively simple narrative of life and death, guiding the viewer through the intertwined trajectories of four universal "types." Canine and human, masked and exposed, these archetypal figures of the Western imagination become entangled with the narrator's own presence, unfolding within a speculative Heaven that mirrors earthly logics while remaining subject to the paradoxes of judgement, belief, and accountability.
Aware of the impossibility of attaining complete detachment, objectivity, or neutrality from context, Kouagou deploys irony and wry humour to expose the inevitability of subjective positioning and the fragile illusion of critical distance. His practice unfolds as a sustained interrogation of how meaning is produced, destabilised, and redirected through language and performance.
The subsequent rooms present a constellation of works from recent years that serve as conceptual and formal precursors to Heaven's truth. In Here & Elsewhere (2024), the artist stages what he describes as a "message for everybody," weaving together fictitious live news formats and paradoxical discourses in which a contemporary aidos—embodied through the artist's own physical presence and a dissonant vocal persona—delivers at once prophetic and destabilising statements to an unsettled audience. In the works surrounding A coin is a coin (2022), already part of the Collezione Maramotti collection, Kouagou develops an allegorical monologue that probes perception and belief, beginning from apparently abstract reflections on duality and circulation, and gradually unsettling the viewer's assumptions about power, freedom, and interpretation. Kouagou's artistic practice, traversing visual art, performance, and textual production, emerges from language as both material and subject. His writing—fragmentary, ironic, and disorienting—becomes the generative core of videos, installations, and live performances that reveal the instability of communication in contemporary media and interpersonal exchange. Through shifting registers of dialogue, monologue, and rhetorical address, his work constructs a disorienting yet lucid experience in which truth—real, potential, or imagined—is constantly negotiated.
The book includes contributions by Ndayé Kouagou, curator and researcher Rita Ouédraogo, and Natalia Sielewicz, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Ndayé Kouagou (né en 1992) est un artiste et performeur basé à Paris. Sa pratique s'articule principalement autour de textes dont il est l'auteur. Volontairement ou involontairement confus, il tente tant bien que mal d'apporter une réflexion sur ces trois sujets : le malaise, le pouvoir et la vulnérabilité. Le résultat est… ce qu'il est. Il décrit son travail comme « assez intéressant, mais pas si intéressant que ça ou peut être pas intéressant du tout ». Il a notamment présenté son travail à la Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Frieze London curated section (London), Wiels (Brussels), Centrale Fies (Dro/Italie), au Centre George Pompidou (Paris).
