Ndayé Kouagou on Language, Control, and Post-Truth in 'Heaven's Truth'

Ndayé Kouagou (born 1992, Montreuil; lives and works in Paris) discusses his first solo exhibition in Italy, 'Heaven's Truth', at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, on view until July 26. The show is co-produced with the Lyon Biennale (2026), where works will be presented in September. Kouagou's practice explores language, archetypes, and the tension between personal and collective experience. He rejects the primacy of the personal, viewing it as a Western construct, and instead focuses on how meaning is constructed through shared contexts. His work employs multiple media—video, performance, text, and sculpture—to create layered narratives that resist fixed interpretation. The exhibition draws on the photoroman genre, controlling viewer experience through spatial arrangement and textual cues. Kouagou addresses post-truth by highlighting the artificiality of beliefs, as seen in his video 'Here & Elsewhere' (2024), where characters respond to the same question with generalized, semi-opaque statements. He sees his work as a testimony to the current reconstruction of belief systems through language. Irony serves as a tool for accessibility. Recent institutional attention includes exhibitions at Fondation Louis Vuitton (2023) and Centre Georges Pompidou (2021) in Paris.