Image: Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in collaboration with Associazione Genesi, presents ‘Continente Arte’, a solo exhibition by Adji Dieye, which is visitable until 11 October 2026. For the exhibition, Dieye presents new productions spanning video installation and sculptural installation.
The project’s central work is a new two-channel video installation that reflects on artistic freedom and the systems through which contemporary art is often narrated, particularly by the market. It addresses stereotypes associated with artists of African descent and audience expectations around specific identity-based and social themes, turning the artwork into a pretext for confirming familiar narratives; the teleshopping broadcast becomes a metaphor for the cultural mediation accompanying contemporary art, questioning the roles of critics, curators, institutions, media and the market in constructing artworks’ meaning and value.
Alongside the video installation, the exhibition presents a series of new sculptures made from metal structures that evoke unstable towers, precarious architecture and constructions in balance. Described as ‘drunken towers’, the sculptures continue Dieye’s investigation of architecture, with Dakar’s Sandaga market as their principal reference; its metal structure was built after the 1922 Colonial Exhibition in Marseille.
The exhibition’s title points to a tension between an artwork and the geographic, historical and identity-based context from which it comes. Here, the ‘continent’ means not only a geographical place but also a set of cultural, ethnic and political affiliations that too often prevails over the art itself, becoming the dominant interpretive key through which the work is viewed, described and assessed.
The project continues a collaboration between the foundation and the association that began in 2023 with the exhibition ‘Mai la luna gridò così tanto’ in Alba and continued in 2024 with a solo exhibition by Binta Diaw at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Dieye, who lives and works between Milan and Dakar, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates how national epistemologies are constructed in public and institutional contexts through archives, architecture, advertising images and media devices.
