Dozie Kanu Pays Homage to the Architecture of Memory in 'The Second Shadow'

Dozie Kanu returns with a new immersive dialogue at Fondazione ICA Milano. Running through May 23, ‘The Second Shadow’ pairs the Houston-born, Portugal-based artist with the late Marc Camille Chaimowicz for an exhibition that blurs the lines between sculpture, domesticity, and memory. Curated by Rita Selvaggio, the project rejects traditional white-cube staging in favor of two autonomous “rooms” that function as psychological landscapes.

In this parallel environment, Kanu’s contribution acts as a living archive, blending his own sculptural practice with selections from the Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection. Known for finding high-art tension in repurposed materials and found objects, Kanu uses this site-specific intervention to bridge the gap between functional design and autobiographical narrative. It is a resonant look at the “double,” where influence isn’t a direct lineage, but a constant process of refraction.

Read on below for our Q&A with Dozie Kanu as he breaks down the evolution of his practice and the making of The Second Shadow.

“My practice in conversation with Chaimowicz allows the viewers to move between two different understandings of how objects might carry emotion, memory, and identity.”

How does placing your artworks next to Chaimowicz’s room change the way people are supposed to use or look at them?

My work in close proximity to Chaimowicz’s room which he dedicated to his admiration for Jean Cocteau creates a kind of conversation that crosses time and deals with domestic space, social stature and how meaning is capable of accumulating through proximity. Marc’s work is very atmospheric. He pays attention to arrangement, and exudes sensitivity to taste and interior life. My work comes from a different set of references, but I also think deeply about domestic space as a site where cultural values are rehearsed and performed. So basically, my practice in conversation with Chaimowicz allows the viewers to move between two different understandings of how objects might carry emotion, memory, and identity.

What made you choose specific pieces from the Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection to sit alongside your own new work?

I tried my best not to think about the selections as a traditional curatorial exercise, or as a way of building any kind of historical argument. The starting point for me was actually Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s relationship and admiration to Jean Cocteau, who he described less as a direct reference and more as a kind of phantom companion who accompanied his formation. That idea stayed close to me. I stayed focused on selecting work from Nicoletta’s collection that could operate in a similar way in relation to my own work. Not as quotations or influences in a direct sense, but as works that echo or extend certain aspects of my artistic language.

The selection became about identifying artists and specific practices that touch on things that are present in my practice, whether it be furniture and domestic space treated as sculpture, questions of ambiguous or constructed subjectivity, and material that carries memory, whether political, personal, or diasporic. I wasn’t trying to overtly illustrate those ideas, but to allow the works to sit in the space almost like companions, so that the room becomes a place where these different sensibilities coexist and quietly inform one another.

In that headspace, my insulation is less a curated exhibition and more a kind of living environment or constructed interior where my work and these selected works help the space think about itself. They are not there to be compared directly, but to create a mental and emotional architecture around the exhibition, where influence is felt spatially and atmospherically rather than spoon-fed didactically.

Does showing your work in a major Milan institution like this change the story of the scrap metal and found objects you use?
Found or scavenged materials automatically carry a previous life, a previous function, and when they enter a gallery they enter another economy of value and meaning. I’ve always been interested in that shift. The same object can move from something discarded to something preserved, and that transition says a lot about how value gets assigned in general.

“If people take anything away from it, I hope it’s the idea that inheritance is not passive. It’s something you build and edit and reinterpret over time.”

Since the show is about inheritance and passing things down, what do you hope people take away from the archive you have built here?

I was thinking about inheritance not just in terms of objects but in terms of knowledge, references, and ways of seeing. For me, there’s this larger question about what it means to inherit culture when your relationship to history feels fragmented or partially erased. A lot of my work is about trying to build a visual language that feels like it belongs to my generation and my background, but that also acknowledges what came before. So the archive in this exhibition is not really an archive in the traditional sense. It’s more like a personal index of influences, materials, and images that have shaped the way I think and feel. If people take anything away from it, I hope it’s the idea that inheritance is not passive. It’s something you build and edit and reinterpret over time. I love many form of artistic expression doesn’t resonate with me amongst my initial encounter but eventually finds a way to grab hold of my interests upon further examinations over years of re- encounters.

Beyond this show, what projects are you working on currently?
Right now I’m working across a few different directions. I’m continuing to develop sculptural work and exhibition projects, but I’m also spending more time thinking about film and architecture as longer-term projects. Film interests me because it allows you to build a complete world and control the emotional pacing in a very precise way. Architecture interests me because it operates at the scale of daily life and community.

In the long term, I’m interested in how these different disciplines can come together—object making, exhibition making, film, and architecture—as different ways of shaping how people move through space and how they understand their environment. Sculpture is just one part of that larger conversation for me right now.

Fondazione ICA Milano
Via Orobia, 26, 20139
Milano MI, Italy