Bubblegum Club

Tag: interdisciplinary art

  • Photographer and Journalist Rahima Gambo’s ‘Education is Forbidden’ makes a social commentary on the post-colonial education system in north-eastern Nigeria

    Photographer and Journalist Rahima Gambo’s ‘Education is Forbidden’ makes a social commentary on the post-colonial education system in north-eastern Nigeria

    Rahima Gambo studied Development at the University of Manchester and thereafter completed a Masters in Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics. This was followed with her Masters in Journalism at Columbia Graduate School in 2014. Her interdisciplinary practice looks at Nigerian identity, gender, socio-political issues and history. Her series Education Is Forbidden makes use of photography, illustration, text and film to articulate a troubling narrative that remains without end.

    With her photo essay, Education is Forbidden, the photographer and journalist challenges the Boko Haram insurrection, the condition of the post-colonial education system in north-eastern Nigeria as well as the status of women in society. Showcased as a part of the curated projects at ART X Lagos art fair, it has been in development since 2015.

    The project has been built on and grown due to support given by the International Women’s Media Foundation, propelled forward by “a curiosity to understand what it means to be a student on the front lines.” Rahima, who is from the region and currently residing in Abuja, travelled to schools and universities in various states to meet activists, pupils and teachers. This acted as an entry point for her documentation of the lasting trauma and infrastructural deterioration, beginning decades before and is currently destabilised by conflict.

    To create this body of work Rahima’s approach was to show girls from a stylised, prolific point of view. Employing traditional portraiture techniques, the photographer aimed to focus on points of familiarity and visual signifiers that remind her audience of how carefree school days should be. These signifiers include a girl blowing a bubble with chewing gum and other girls calmly look into her lens. The works take a frontal approach created collaboratively with the girls that she photographed.

    Rahima tells these girls’ stories as their youth is poisoned by these events of trauma. It is important to note that she does not intend to label them by these circumstances or define them as victims. “The project is not based on trauma because you can find that in any condition, no matter how comfortable…” she expresses in an interview with Nataal. Her series has the twofold effect of being both a visual documentation and captured moments of collective memory. Her work is then a visual narrative speaking of the cruelties of conflict and its effect on the educational framework of the region.

  • Entering the Ring of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Practice // The Centre for the Less Good Idea

    The Centre is a space to follow impulses, connections and revelations. It’s a physical space for artists to come together over two seasons every year and for curators to bring together combinations of text, performance, image and dance, because an ensemble sees the world differently to how one individual does. – Bronwyn Lace

    The pulsing jabs of boxing gloves ricochet around the arena. A stage set for the reverberations of recited lines delivered and directed. Intercepted by imagined instruments. Recited in conversations and in the nightly dreams of dancers. A performance of muscle choreographed through memory. A collaborative curation. Experimentally articulated. Tentatively, drawn out from behind the curtain comes, the Less Good Idea.

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    Derived in part from a Twana proverb, The Centre for the Less Good Idea debut season gathers more than 60 practitioners in the fields of acting, dance, poetry, writing, music, visual arts, film and even boxing. Convened under the guidance of curators, Khayelihle Dominique Gumede, Lebogang Mashile, Gregory Maqoma and William Kentridge. Core curators had been in conversation for many months prior to this explosion of talent and all contributing artists mobilized for a workshop series in December 2016 to further explore and expand the established concepts.

    Bubblegum delved into conversation with the Centre’s animateur, Bronwyn Lace. She described her role as bringing “life, momentum and energy to the space as well as to pull the threads of networks not easily within reach towards the Centre”. In sussing the Joburg and South African art scene she will continue to observe and engage with artists – identifying and introducing collaborators to one another for future seasons.

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    “The Centre is a physical and immaterial space to allow discoveries in the process of making work to flow.” She continues, “Often, you start with a good idea. It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it to the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside you.”

    Born out of a desire to foster a space for artists in the city, the Centre was initiated and funded by William Kentridge. Collaboration and a sense of play are at the crux of this interdisciplinary project. “It wants to be a rare and safe space for failure, for projects to be tried and discarded because they do not work.” Collaborators were initially invited right at the start of conceptulising a new season. Conversations based on existing work were explored as well as their ability to extend into the interdisciplinary setting. “The conceptual crux of season 1 is to introduce, hold and push the concept of the less good idea by bringing multiple disciplines in to one space and asking them to invent, to test and to play.”

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    Season 1 will launch this week on Wednesday the 1st of March with four short plays by Samuel Beckett. Events including film installations, collaborative performances and unconventional boxing matches will continue throughout the week. The Centre will expand even further with Season 2 launching in October 2017 under an entirely new set of curators. Season 3 will follow in the early stages of 2018.

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