The Second Shadow. Dozie Kanu Mirroring Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with Shared Echoes and Kindred Spirits

ICA Milano

The exhibition The Second Shadow. Dozie Kanu Mirroring Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with Shared Echoes and Kindred Spirits brings into dialogue two environmental installations conceived as rooms: Jean Cocteau (2003–2014) by Marc Camille Chaimowicz (Paris 1947 – London 2024) and a new site-specific intervention by Dozie Kanu (1993, Houston), designed as a response to and reflection of the historic work. The project originates as a reflection on the double, inheritance, and the affective transmission of forms, activating a genealogy that brings together Cocteau, Chaimowicz, and Kanu. The exhibition does not aim at a literal reconstruction, but rather creates a resonant device: two autonomous environments that observe and transform each other from a distance, like reflective surfaces that delay the image to allow thought to emerge.

Just as Chaimowicz’s room is defined from the outset as a hosting structure — a space prepared to welcome presences, works, objects — the environment conceived by Kanu is also given as a field of active hospitality through formative presences and practices that have shaped his research as lateral teachings. The works, selected from the Nicoletta Fiorucci collection and integrated into Kanu’s working field, do not function as tributes or declarative references, but as dynamic thresholds of activation.

Curated by Rita Selvaggio with the support of Giulia Civardi, curator, Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection