Instruments of Air

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

14:51 in loop

Rahima Gambo

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“ I think we are oversaturated, filled to the brim with images in our inner subconscious eye. Towards the end of 2020, I was feeling very much that I couldn’t take in any more information visually. That was when I made Instruments of Air. Especially after watching the video of George Floyd’s killing online, and the feeling of constriction and breathlessness it evoked, I was thinking a lot about air, and what it means to inhale bad air, and for it to get lodged in you and weaken or sicken you, and how that air can be cleared. And, I wonder what happens to all of those images that we see, where do they go inside us and what happens when there’s too many “bad” images, too much bad air? ” – Rahima Gambo, 2021 Wandering through the red earth of Burkina Faso’s Central Plateau, the artist Rahima Gambo holds a bronze circle in her hand, twirling it until it frames the sun. Birds sing. A flute interferes in the general chirping, and joins the rustling of the branches under the footsteps. The walk is long but light. Different bronze objects follow one another in the palm of her hand: an L, a semi-circle, a hut, a meander, a straight line. Gambo calls them “wander-lines”; they alternate with others–a copper bird, two feathers, a bunch of branches. The hand rotates them, the step and the camera walk along the small roads and cross a herd of cows. In the exhibition space, facing the screen, an installation gathers copper spirals imitating the movement of walking, fluid and continuous, littered with nests, stones and vegetation. Continuing her experimental practice of walking, Gambo makes us see and feel a non-verbal language that evokes interspecies communication techniques; those of birds, herds of cows and termites, their habitats and their ways of moving. The accompanying flute is melodious, both soft and jerky. Using her sculpture-instruments as spatial and sensory markers for the viewer, Gambo proposes navigational tools that allow us to (re)place ourselves in and with the living. Text by Salma Mochtari, Diaspora at Home exhibition brochure, KADIST Paris, October 15, 2021

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With a background in photojournalism, artist Rahima Gambo entered into visual art by way of long-form documentary projects. Through her interdisciplinary practice, which includes photography, film, video installation, drawing, sculpture, and sound, Gambo explores the cartographies of documentary storytelling. Her work especially focuses on how the possibilities of walking and photography intersect with psycho-spiritual-geographies, sociopolitics, autobiography, the environment and public spaces. Rahima Gambo is also involved with the project Diaspora at Home , a collaboration between CCA, Lagos and KADIST, Paris.

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Colors:

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• landscape.n.01
• politics.n.01
• racism.n.01
• geography.n.01
• materiality.n.01