The ICA Milano Foundation presents The Second Shadow. Dozie Kanu Mirroring Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with Shared Echoes and Kindred Spirits, a new exhibition that relates two generations of artists and two distinct ways of inhabiting the exhibition space through image, shadow and duality. Curated by Rita Selvaggio with the support of Giulia Civardi and produced in collaboration with the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, the two-person show intertwines different times, memories, and sensitivities, transforming the rooms of the ICA Milano Foundation into a field of emotional, formal, and poetic transmission, where the legacy of forms is never mere citation but continuous reactivation.

At the heart of the project, the dialogue between Jean Cocteau (2003 – 2014) by Marc Camille Chaimowicz (Paris 1947 – London 2024) and a new site-specific installation by Dozie Kanu (Houston 1993). The exhibition brings together two environmental installations conceived as rooms, not proposing a philological reconstruction, but a resonance device, where the two environments observe and transform each other from a distance, like reflective surfaces that delay the image to let the thought emerge.

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Chaimowicz's room, inspired by Jean Cocteau, is configured as a domestic and theatrical interior at the same time: an environment inhabited by presences and desires, where every object and fragment of décor is laden with memory, allusion, intimacy. An absent portrait that transforms the French poet, writer, and filmmaker into an evoked presence rather than an illustrated referent, making poetry a theater of interiority and form a language of the self. Twenty years later, Dozie Kanu enters this sensitive architecture as if entering a living archive and proposes a twin room, not for imitation but for refraction. The Second Shadow is his response and counterpoint: an environment that shifts the coordinates of the historical work, questions its device, distorts its codes, introducing a continuous tension between heritage and invention, light and opacity, recognition and rejection.

Whereas Chaimowicz defines Cocteau from the outset as a hosting structure — a space predestined to welcome presences, works, objects, and deviations — Kanu's environment is conceived as an active field of hospitality traversed by formative and practical presences that have influenced his research as lateral teachings. The works, chosen from the Nicoletta Fiorucci collection and integrated into Kanu's field of work, do not operate as tributes or declarative references, but as dynamic thresholds of activation.

Where Chaimowicz makes Cocteau a domestic figure, immersed in an intimate and theatrical mental landscape, Kanu turns Chaimowicz himself into an affective architecture: a form that regenerates in relation to other works, practices, and presences, a shadow that detaches from the original body to become something else, open to new projections and readings.