Dan Halter

Dan Halter, a Zimbabwean artist living in South Africa, works on themes such as the loss of a sense of national belonging, migration and the postcolonial condition. He uses common materials and a conceptual approach in his works. This exhibition presents a recent work, Machiavelli, which superimposes the image of the 100,000 lira on which Caravaggio was represented, to the full text of The Prince by the famous Tuscan humanist. According to Federico Chabod, a historian and politician from Valle d’Aosta, it was in fact Machiavelli who was the first to theorise in his reflections a Europe understood not only as a geographical expression but also as a secular and autonomous entity, where the fragmentation into numerous states was a source of balance between powers, contrary to what happened in the great Asian empires; these divisions therefore stimulated the competition and differentiation that over the centuries generated the continent’s variety and cultural richness. European consciousness is therefore, according to Chabod and Machiavelli, polyphonic and inhomogeneous by its very nature and must seek in this multiplicity its true strength and richness.