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.

On 19 March, the exhibition at ICA Milano will briefly shift its condition through two performative gestures unfolding within the installation.

One of these moments brings into motion Abito-Tovaglia (1984) by Cinzia Ruggeri. Conceived at the intersection of fashion, design and sculpture, the work transforms a table into a garment and a garment into an environment. When worn, the piece unfolds around the body like a mobile domestic surface: the table leaves its static position and begins to circulate through space, turning the everyday ritual of dressing into a spatial action.

Alongside this gesture appears a performer wearing Players (2010), the LED mask from The Host and the Cloud by Pierre Huyghe. Originally developed for Huyghe’s filmed performance staged in the abandoned Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris, the mask replaces the human face with a luminous electronic surface. Identity is suspended; the body becomes a moving carrier of situations, a figure whose presence is defined not by expression but by light.

Within the same evening, these two presences briefly traverse the exhibition. A domestic object becomes a garment; a face dissolves into a field of light. The installation opens itself to movement, and the space becomes a passage of bodies, surfaces and appearances.


Online Program – The Second Shadow. Dozie Kanu Mirroring Marc Camille Chaimowicz, with Shared Echoes and Kindred Spirits.
A collection of conversations, texts, and contributions developed throughout the exhibition to extend its dialogue beyond the exhibition space. The program will remain available as a permanent archive on the Lenz Press website: https://www.lenz.press/products/the-second-shadow