The Stranger's Notebook
Installation view, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, KA, 2016
The Stranger’s Notebook links extensive journeys across Western and Northern Africa, Western and Southern Europe. Traversing these complex networks enabled a unique purview to analyze the disjuncture between contemporary experiences of mobility and their prevalent narratives. The photographs document landscapes, site-responsive actions, found and constructed scenarios. The filmic works privilege visual ambiguity and draw upon fragmentation and opaque images. The sound installations soundscapes build upon this logic, replacing the visual with nuanced soundscapes that offer a delicate balance of estrangement and familiarity. Combined, these multiple forms interrogate how social experiences of mobility are rendered. The formal structures — often poetic and allusive— play out in sites of uneven geographies and contested histories. The result is a multi-perspective audiovisual environment that situates audiences within aesthetic interpretations of mobility framed as dispersed experiences.
The Stranger's Notebook
Installation view, H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City, KA, 2016
A series of complicated ambivalences, Bamako, Mali
Archival colour pigment prints, 20 x 25” each, 2016
Forms of Passage
3-channel video installation, HD, 7:21”, 2016
The Shop
Single channel video, HD, 5:27 mins, 2016
This short moving image work examines intra-African migrancy, and the correlation between conditions of film and forms of labour. The subject of the film is Michael, a young man from Benin who lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. The film was produced in the tailor shop where Michael plies his trade daily.
The Shop confronts geopolitical issues of African subjects residing in globalization’s shadows while putting strategies of documentary films into question. The work challenges conventions of visual representation by calling to attention the limits of vision and how it can (mis)register information. Facticity and specificity are not negated rather they are interweaved within imaginary registers of the image. The blurring of backgrounds, tightly cropped frames capture the play of light and colour resulting in an evocation of the incidental and fleeting moments that characterize any space. The opacity of the images-fields of darkness-make apparent light as a necessary condition for film while signaling an image’s inability to capture the “truth” of a subject.
Nearness and distance constitute a position, Nouakchott, Mauritania
Archival colour pigment prints, 30 x 112.5, 2016
Confrontation (The always incomplete construction of thresholds), Tangier, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, Archival colour pigment print, 40 x 50”, 2017
Untitled, Tangier, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, 40 x 50”, 2017
Untitled (Distance) Cap Spartel, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, 40 x 50”, 2016
Act of Recovery (Part I), Nouakchott, Mauritania
Archival colour pigment print, 20 x 26”, 2016
Act of Recovery (Part II), Nouakchott, Mauritania
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Flight Pattern, Boukhalef, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, 40 x 50", 2017
The Green March (Beyond the conclusive logic of monumentality), Tamougrite, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
The Green March (Beyond the conclusive logic of monumentality), Tamougrite, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, 20 x 24”, 2016
Untitled (Prologue II), Nouakchott, Mauritania
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Prologue III), Nouakchott, Mauritania
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Prologue), Yamoussoukro, Cote d’Ivoire
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Epilogue II), Catania, Italy
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Epilogue), Catania, Italy
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Epilogue III), Catania, Italy
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Overlapping and intertwined territories that fall from view I), Catania, Italy
Archival colour pigment print, 20 x 25”, 2016
Untitled (Overlapping and intertwined territories that fall from view III), Catania, Italy
Archival colour pigment print, 30 x 37.50”, 2016
Untitled (Overlapping and intertwined territories that fall from view II), Catania, Italy
Archival colour pigment print, 20 x 25”, 2016
Tra il dire e il fare c’è in mezzo il mare, Lampedusa, Italy
Archival monochrome pigment prints, 40 x 100”, 2016