Image: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia
Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia will present 'Heaven’s truth', the first solo exhibition in Italy by Paris-based artist Ndayé Kouagou, from 3 May to 26 July 2026. Announced in connection with the Festival Fotografia Europea 2026, the exhibition brings together recent works and a new project made specifically for the show. Admission will be free during the museum’s temporary exhibition opening hours.
The exhibition title is also the name of Kouagou’s new ambitious production, which occupies the first rooms of the display. According to the institution, the work is inspired by the narrative device of the photo-novel and combines video, three-dimensional elements and wall-based works. The central work is a video divided into three chapters, from which the surrounding pieces emerge. In the artist’s hands, the video introduces a simple story about life and death and leads visitors through the fortunes of four universal “types.”
Those figures — described in the exhibition text as canine, human, physically masked and psychologically revealed, and as archetypes of the Western world — are woven into the narrator’s own fate in an imagined Paradise that mirrors the dynamics of earthly life and its dilemmas of judgment. The exhibition text says Kouagou uses irony to underline the impossibility of being fully objective or detached from the context in which one lives. A line from the video, quoted by the museum, advises viewers not to trust appearances too quickly: “if someone seems very sure of themselves, it does not mean they are telling the truth.”
Kouagou’s practice, as presented by Collezione Maramotti, moves between visual art and performance and places language at its center. The museum says his texts, which often appear familiar, confused and ironic at once, are the source and pulse of his videos, installations and live performances. Across those works, the institution points to the instability of language, the opacity of words and the slippages of meaning that shape media and interpersonal communication. The result is described as a narrative experience that is disorienting, playful and existential, and one that probes truth, vulnerability, unease and power.
The exhibition also includes several works from recent years that feed into the new production. Among them is 'Here & Elsewhere' (2024), a video installation described by the artist as a “message for everyone,” in which fictional news-style broadcasts alternate with paradoxical reflections delivered by a contemporary bard embodied by the artist and voiced by a woman. Another group of works is linked to 'A coin is a coin' (2022), already part of the Collezione Maramotti archive, in which Kouagou performs an allegorical monologue that questions perception and reality through abstract reflections on the two sides of a coin.
Collezione Maramotti said a book will be published in connection with the exhibition, titled 'Ndayé Kouagou. Real Things Start Outside'. It will include texts by Kouagou, researcher and curator Rita Ouédraogo, and Natalia Sielewicz, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The publication is issued by Mousse Publishing in Milan. The museum also states that the production of the new works in the exhibition was supported by Collezione Maramotti in collaboration with Heidelberger Kunstverein, where a second manifestation of the show will open from 3 September 2026. Some works from the project will also be shown at the 18th Biennale de Lyon – Art contemporain from 19 September 2026.
