Continente Arte @ Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italie: Adji Dieye

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in collaboration with Associazione Genesi, presents Continente Arte, a solo exhibition by Adji Dieye curated by Ilaria Bernardi. The project continues the collaboration between the two institutions, initiated in 2023 to support emerging generations of Italian artists active on the international scene.

Through a new two-channel video installation and a series of previously unseen sculptures, Dieye explores how language and architecture can give form to cultural imaginaries that, sedimented over time, continue to shape the way we understand the present.

At the heart of the exhibition is a reflection on a form of Western cultural unconscious and on the often unquestioned categories through which the art system interprets artworks and assigns them value. Set within a teleshopping studio, the video installation approaches, with irony and critical insight, the mechanisms through which the market, media and institutions project preconceived narratives onto artists, reducing the complexity of their practices to a set of predetermined readings.

Through two distinct registers, the two sales presenters, Tiziana Bianchi (a fictional character played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and Alessandro Orlando (who plays himself while also taking on the role of an art fair salesperson), construct narratives that attribute value to the artworks by relying almost exclusively on elements external to their formal and conceptual complexity. The focus shifts to the artist’s geographical origins, stereotypes associated with artists of African descent, and audiences’ expectations around certain identity-based and social themes, ultimately turning the artwork into a pretext for confirming narratives that are already established. Teleshopping thus becomes a metaphor for the processes of cultural mediation surrounding contemporary art, questioning the role of critics, curators, institutions, media and the market in the construction of meaning and value.

Extending the themes explored in the video installation, a series of sculptures inspired by Neo-Sudanese architecture transposes this same process of projection into the material realm. Tilted and traversed by mirrors, the structures reveal how an imaginary can acquire material substance and ultimately come to stand in for what it claims to represent.

Also on 10 September, at 7 pm, Luc Ndikubwimana will present the performance RE-VEIL: the sound of images.

The work focuses on rewriting the collective imaginary through an Afrofuturist sound art performance in dialogue with a video art composition. Both are centred on the histories of Black art, African diasporic cultures and Black voices that have shaped and transformed contemporary history.

The performance therefore resists the vision preserved within what we might call our “archive of ideas”—an archive deeply marked by racism, which we draw upon every day in the way we perceive the world. Instead, it seeks to reclaim the narratives of Black histories and to make visible the connections between music, dance and Black diasporic traditions, whether global, diasporic or otherwise.

The performance marks the culmination of the Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship, an affirmative-action initiative addressing the lack of diversity within the artistic landscape, developed by Centrale Fies in collaboration with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana.

As part of Torino, che cultura!, the City of Turin’s cultural funding programme, supported by PN METRO PLUS e CITTÀ MEDIE SUD 2021–2027 (TO7.5.1.1.B – Support for the urban economy in the cultural sector).