Les filles du calvaire is delighted to announce Kenny Dunkan’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. A former resident of the Villa Medici, Dunkan envisions Keep Going! as an initiatory journey teeming with images, sculptures and videos.
La scelta di pubblicare in lingua inglese vuole aprire il nostro magazine ai lettori internazionali.
Paris. France.
Questioning the great colonial heritage …
Drawing from Caribbean culture, fashion and design, he develops a performative and hybrid work that questions colonial heritage and fragmented identity.
Édouard Glissant: “Chaos is beautiful when one understands that all its elements are equally necessary.”
Cartography of the Intimate by Simon Njami (writer, narrator, essayist) Despite a layout that appears chaotic, bringing together fragments that constitute so many elements of a very carefully staged puzzle, intimacy is indeed what is at play here. The exhibition’s theatricality is there to surprise, destabilise, disorient. The artist moreover endorses chaos and assumes its reality by quoting Édouard Glissant: “Chaos is beautiful when one understands that all its elements are equally necessary.” But instead of following Glissant in the development he conceived of the cultures of the world, I will instead evoke the philosopher Henri Delacroix in his definition of language, which he describes as “one of the instruments that transform the chaotic world of sensations into a world of objects and representations”.
Dunkan often starts with his own black body, which he stages through different mediums, from video to performance, sculpture and assemblage
Kenny Dunkan regularly draws on the visual culture of the Caribbean and in particular on carnivals, periods of social, cultural and political role reversal, to develop a work that addresses the French colonial heritage and the persistence of its modes of representation. To achieve this, Dunkan often starts with his own black body, which he stages through different mediums, from video to performance, sculpture and assemblage. Graduating from the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2014 with commendation from the jury, he won the ADAGP prize for visual arts at the Salon de Montrouge in 2015. From 2016 to 2017, Kenny Dunkan was a resident of the Villa Médicis, Académie de France in Rome.
Kenny Dunkan’s Keep Going! opening this Saturday at Les Filles du Calvaire 2-6pm in Paris
Exhibition for 6 March to 24 April 2021
Opening Saturday 6 March 2021 from 2 pm to 7 pm
