For her first solo exhibition in an Italian institution, artist Adji Dieye presents three new artworks that expand her project, Culture Lost and Learned by Heart, begun in 2020.
Starting from her research into the National Iconographic Archives of Senegal, founded in 1913 by the former French colonial regime, Adji Dieye undertakes a personal investigation into the role these institutions continue to play in the post-independent country.
While such research is necessarily conveyed by the materials that the archives still contain and their state of preservation, Adji Dieye approaches them with an awareness of the taxonomic processes and forms of removal to which they may have been subjected. At the same time, the ‘complicity’ that Adji Dieye agrees to establish with them is not aimed at unveiling or rewriting ‘alternative’ histories–a paradigm that the artist rejects–but at asking herself ‘how a post-independent country uses the same imperial technology once used to exercise hegemony over its people in representing its cultural heritage today’.
Cur. Emanuele Guidi
