Dozie Kanu,

Dance with Daemons

19 May 2024 — 11 August 2024

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen

For the first time in the Fondation Beyeler’s more than 25-year history, the entire museum and its surrounding park will be transformed into the site of an experimental exhibition of contemporary art. Organised by Fondation Beyeler in partnership with LUMA Foundation, the show will bring together the work of 30 participants from different backgrounds and disciplines, including Michael Armitage, Anne Boyer, Federico Campagna, Ian Cheng, Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, Marlene Dumas, Frida Escobedo, Peter Fischli, Cyprien Gaillard with Victor Man, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Wade Guyton, Carsten Höller with Adam Haar, Pierre Huyghe, Arthur Jafa, Koo Jeong A, Dozie Kanu, Cildo Meireles, Jota Mombaça, Fujiko Nakaya, Alice Notley, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Rachel Rose, Tino Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Adrián Villar Rojas.

Developed by Sam Keller, Mouna Mekouar, Isabela Mora, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno and Tino Sehgal in close collaboration with the participants, the exhibition aspires to stimulate artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange and collective responsibility. The approach, as stated by Philippe Parreno and Precious Okoyomon, acknowledges ‘the complexities and uncertainties involved in bringing artists together, yet it also embraces these entanglements as integral to the creative process’. The show is envisioned as ‘a dynamic rather than static proposal, an evolving ontological project that mirrors the complexity and diversity inherent in bringing together distinct artistic voices under one umbrella’.

In the exhibition, Kanu transforms the cloakroom into a cabinet of curiosities. The lockers are converted into vitrines displaying objects. This collection, consisting of found or natural things with no clear connection to one another, resist classification and hierarchy. Each of Kanu's objects contain a combination of fact and fiction. They offer him the opportunity to tell a story or even to create a new one. Yet Kanu reminds us: 'I just can't get bogged down by the concepts too much because it's like soul spill'.

Also within the exhibition, Kanu aimed at expanding the traditional boundaries of sculpture and creating objects that viewers and museum guards are invited to manipulate with CHAIR [xx] (Foundation Beyeler Security), 2024. The goal was to go beyond the purely optical and include tactile qualities as well. Fueled by his fascination for Franz West's chairs at the Fondation Beyeler, Kanu invites us to sit and linger on his seats, which simultaneously retain their status as elusive works of art.

Dozie Kanu

Appropriating found objects and refashioning them to new aesthetics, Dozie Kanu creates sculptures and photography that are inherently disobedient and stubbornly slippery. They resist classification and exist instead as communicative or performative objects. Kanu’s ongoing investigation into the limits of form, functionality, materiality and usefulness are often filtered through a personal lens drawn from the artist’s lived experiences.

In the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Owe Deed, One Deep, 2020, every sculpture remixes and modifies found objects, with the visible rust as a reminder of how readily items are discarded once they are deemed no longer productive. The repurposing of objects deemed useless, the artist honours and reanimates the people whose labour gave them function. In extending the lives of these unwanted items, he perpetuates the existence of those who brought them into being. His memorialisation is a site of collective mourning of which has not yet ceased to exist, acknowledging that the pathways and legacies of the oppressive systems of the past continue to characterize the present.

Born and raised in Houston, Texas to Nigerian immigrant parents, Kanu initially intended to study film directing but shifted his focus to production design for film and theatre, receiving his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2016. Dozie Kanu’s first solo institutional exhibition was at the Studio Museum of Harlem in 2019.

Last year, Kanu opened his second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Tinted Spirit. In May 2022, the public sculpture commission On Elbows was shown as part of the Public Art Fund exhibition Black Atlantics. In September 2022, Cordyceps Gaud Adversary opened at Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Dozie Kanu's first solo European institutional exhibition.

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