Chapter 1: May my vision be your present: “Principals”, 2024. Ferro dipinto, serigrafia su seta 120x210x60 cm.

Adji Dieye (1991) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works between Milan and Dakar.

Her practice investigates the processes through which national epistemologies are constructed and disseminated within public and institutional contexts, connecting knowledge production, representational devices, and power dynamics.

Raised in a context marked by a complex historical and cultural stratification, she develops research attentive to colonial legacies and the mechanisms through which contemporary identities are narrated and legitimized.

Since his early days, his work has focused on critically analyzing official narratives of progress and modernity. Through the examination of archives, visual languages, and institutional spaces, Dieye investigates the ways in which images, texts, and architectural structures contribute to constructing a shared collective imagination.

The transnational dimension of her experience, spanning Europe and West Africa, is a central element of her practice, allowing her to compare different models of representation and systems of knowledge transmission.
At the core of her research is the relationship between representation and the construction of reality.
Her works highlight the tensions between lived experience and institutional narrative, questioning the promises of development and progress often presented as linear and universal paths. Through an approach that intertwines historical analysis and speculative imagination, the artist highlights the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the visual and discursive devices that define what is recognized as legitimate knowledge.

Dieye’s practice is characterized by a multidisciplinary language that includes photography, video, installation, and archival research.
Historical documents, advertising images, architectural elements, and exhibition devices are activated as critical materials, capable of revealing the ideological and political logic underlying systems of representation. The works often take on an installation dimension and engage with the exhibition space, engaging the viewer in a process of active and reflective interpretation.

Overall, Adji Dieye’s research offers a rigorous and critical reflection on the relationships between image, knowledge, and power.
Through an analytical and conceptually layered practice, the artist constructs visual devices that invite us to question the systems through which history is told and the future is imagined, establishing himself as one of the most significant voices of his generation in the contemporary debate on the construction of knowledge and the collective imagination.

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