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.

As part of the exhibition, a screening of Jean Cocteau’s film The Testament of Orpheus (1960) will take place at the Fondazione Prada's Cinema Godard on Thursday, May 21, 2026.

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MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ

Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1947, Paris – 2024, London), born in the immediate post-war period to a Polish father and a French mother, moved to the United Kingdom as a child. He trained in London, studying at Ealing, Camberwell, and the Slade School of Fine Art. Within a new artistic climate attentive to reducing the distance between art and life and often permeated by performative practice, his very existence became a vast creative laboratory. By inhabiting exhibition spaces, Chaimowicz staged domestic environments and everyday situations: he set up hotel lobbies, furnished them with his own handmade objects, welcomed visitors by serving tea, and accompanied the experience with a soundtrack. When performance became institutionalised as an artistic practice and lost its subversive character, the artist chose to abandon it. Between 1975 and 1979, he designed the interior of his apartment on Approach Road. Wallpapers, curtains, and videos made while performing within his own décor: every element was imagined, drawn, and conceived to measure, transforming the domestic space into a place predisposed to rêverie. From the 1980s onward, his décors and furnishings—arranged like theatrical sets—entered museums. Since then, numerous exhibitions—from London to New York and Basel—have presented the series of interiors by this internationally renowned artist.


DOZIE KANU

Dozie Kanu (1993, Houston, Texas) is a Nigerian-American artist who currently lives and works in Santarém, Portugal. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2016 and later participated in the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon in 2022. Kanu’s practice operates at the intersection of form and function, expanding the space between art and design. Working with reused materials and found objects, he constructs a personal visual language shaped by autobiography, references to pop culture, and the broader material histories of the African diaspora. His sculptures and installations, while resisting fixed categories, frequently draw on utilitarian or domestic structures and exist simultaneously as functional, communicative, and performative objects. Kanu’s work has been presented in a wide range of exhibition contexts, including galleries and major art institutions. Among his most recent and significant institutional presentations are Cloud Chronicles at the LUMA Foundation in Arles (2025); Supermöbel at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (2025); the three-part series Hoi Köln at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (2024); Sommerausstellung at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (2024); Conversation Pieces at SFMOMA in San Francisco (2022); Black Atlantic, commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York (2022); Enzo Mari, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, at the Triennale di Milano (2020); Crack Up – Crack Down at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (2020); Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder at 180 The Strand in London (2019); Crack Up – Crack Down at the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (2019); and FUNCTION, a solo presentation at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York (2019).

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The exhibition The Second Shadow stems from the collaboration between Fondazione ICA Milano and Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation. 

Fondazione ICA Milano thanks Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, the foundation's official sponsor, Valsoia and Enel for their support of the institutional program and activities.