AKKA Project presents
Dangerous Desires | Group Exhibition
Venice | October 3 – December, 2025

Rewriting a historical figure
In 2025, the city of Venice will mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Casanova, one of the most enigmatic, mythologized, and controversial figures in European history. More than a seducer, Casanova was a tireless traveler, a prolific writer, a refined libertine, and a master of self-invention who moved effortlessly between aristocratic salons and the prisons of the Serenissima. His image lingers somewhere between reality and legend, between charm and manipulation, between liberation and domination. From this layered and ambiguous legacy emerges Dangerous Desires, the exhibition presented by AKKA Project in its Venetian space from October 3rd through December 2025.

A counter-narrative through contemporary Africa
Dangerous Desires is conceived as a contemporary, political, and aesthetic response to Casanova’s figure and the systems it represents. Rather than reiterating fascination with the archetype of the libertine, the exhibition deconstructs and subverts it, offering a space for reinterpretation through the voices of a carefully selected group of artists from the African continent. Each artist has been invited to engage with the complex meanings and tensions behind desire, power, beauty, identity, and freedom—offering interpretations that range from the poetic to the political, from the personal to the mythical.

Themes crossing history, the body, and myth
The exhibition unfolds like a narrative web, where each work becomes a critical, poetic, or symbolic node. The themes explored are layered and urgent: the freedom of the self and liberation from social, political, or cultural constraints; desire as a force of attraction and resistance, a language of love but also of control; the mask and masquerade as tools of transformation and performative identity, bridging the Venetian tradition with African ritual practices, where identity is not hidden but multiplied, reclaimed, and performed. Travel also plays a central role—understood not only as physical migration but as emotional passage, cultural movement, and personal metamorphosis.

A rich and multifaceted artistic language
The works presented—spanning painting, sculpture and drawing—compose an immersive and fluid
landscape where each artist offers a singular response to the call of the theme. This results in a polyphonic, urgent, and deeply contemporary narrative that reclaims desire not as an impulse to be tamed, but as a profound existential tension, a site of resistance, a declaration of self, and a challenge to normative aesthetics.

An exhibition that speaks to the present
With Dangerous Desires, AKKA Project continues its commitment to amplifying contemporary African voices within the global art conversation, fostering a space where artistic narratives can transcend borders, confront inherited power structures, and generate new meanings. At a time when it is more urgent than ever to question how desire, representation, and control are shaped, imposed, or resisted, this exhibition invites viewers to pause, to reflect, and to listen to voices that offer not only critique—but transformation.