Dangerous Desires

AKKA Project Venice presents Dangerous Desires, a group exhibition that engages with the legacy of Giacomo Casanova - Venice’s most infamous libertine - through a radical, contemporary African lens. The show marks the 300th anniversary of Casanova’s birth, a moment that invites not only celebration but also critical reflection. Revered as a seducer, writer, traveler, and symbol of the Enlightenment, Casanova is also emblematic of an era shaped by colonial expansion, gendered power dynamics, and the romanticization of dominance.

Dangerous Desires, is not a retrospective, but a provocation. Rather than glorify the myth, the exhibition repositions it - using Casanova as a metaphorical figure through which to examine desire, power, identity, and autonomy in today’s world. 

The exhibition will bring together a diverse group of contemporary African artists, each invited to respond to the thematic framework in their own way. Some may reinterpret aspects of Casanova’s legend; others may reflect on seduction, other from African ritual and masquerade traditions, or explore the tensions between freedom and control, visibility and concealment, beauty and resistance.

What does it mean to desire - and to be desired - on one’s own terms? When does desire become dangerous? And who gets to define pleasure, intimacy, and liberation?

Set in Venice - a city synonymous with mystery, masks, excess, and transformation -Dangerous Desires creates a space for dialogue between past and present, Europe and Africa, mythology and reality. By reframing the Casanova myth through this multiplicity of voices, Dangerous Desires offers not just a counter-narrative, but an act of reclamation.