Rahima Gambo is a visual artist based between London and Abuja. Her work explores the conceptual territories between photography, moving image, and installation as it intersects with documentary, storytelling, biography, and place. She studied photojournalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is currently pursuing studies at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Gambo’s work process is circular and iterative, marked by repetition and return to sites of interest. In 2019, she founded “A Walk Space”, a mobile art studio that supports and accommodates the intersection of movement, image, and narrative.
Rahima Gambo and Tatsuniya Artist Collective
Nigeria
Tatsuniya, Tatsuniya
“Tatsuniya,” meaning story, tale, or riddle in Hausa, is a photography and film series set primarily at Shehu Sanda Kyarimi School in Maiduguri, Nigeria. The project offers a poetic alternative narrative about the experiences of students schooling in Northeastern Nigeria.
The work extends a collaboration with 20 students who perform throughout the series. We see them move from classroom spaces into a dense green forest in dream-like sequences shaped by intuition and improvisation. Children’s games, poetry, and exercises from a Physical Education textbook for secondary schools provide a loose framework for weaving the visual narrative together. The choreographed movements in the photographs and film were developed during storytelling workshops held in 2017 and 2019. These workshops, conducted over seven days, used daily themes to create a playful space where the undefined could emerge without fixed interpretation.
Gambo first visited the school in 2015 while producing Education Is Forbidden, a long-form multimedia work exploring how students experienced the Boko Haram conflict, during which schools were targeted. Shehu Sanda Kyarimi Government Secondary School was one such site attacked in 2013. Although the Tatsuniya series began in 2017, it does not continue that narrative; instead, it opens up new collaborative models centered on agency, play, and togetherness, offering fresh propositions about documentary and photographic processes.
The Tatsuniya Artist Collective, formed through these workshops, is a registered organisation for the student collaborators. It serves as a space for initiating projects, accessing support, and sustaining long-term collaboration, authorship, and representation. Members include: Maryam Abdullahi Mustapha, Aisha Garba Satomi, Juliana Samuel, Binta Maina Amna, Aisha Mohammed Abubakar, Maryam Yahaya, Kaltum Ibrahim, Fatima Ali Bukar, Amina Bashir, Zainab Musa Usman, Hauwa Adam Sani, Aisha Ali, Ruth Andrew Hassan, Halima Mohammed Mallam, Aisha Aisami, Hadiza Alhaji Bukar, Hadiza Mustapha, Fatima Bulama, Aisha Abacha, Aisha Bukar, Faiza Ali Abubakar, and Fatima Abatcha.