Rahima Gambo is a visual artist who explores the conceptual territories between photography, moving image and installation as it intersects with documentary, storytelling, biography and place. Recent projects play with ideas of an embodied and psychosocial experience of moving between fictional and real environments. Each project is an attempt at map-making a situated, active, embodied knowledge production. Her process-driven practice is often circular and serial, where repetition and return to sites of interest are essential. In 2019 she founded A Walk Space, a mobile art studio that explores the complex intersections of the moving image. Gambo previously studied photojournalism at Columbia Universit Graduate School of Journalism and is currently enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools, London.
Rahima Gambo and Tatsuniya Artist Collective
Tatsuniya, Tatsuniya
Tatsuniya is a Hausa word that translates to tales – folktales or fairytales for children. In this spirit, Gambo created her project as a poetic alternative narrative about the experiences of students schooling in Northeastern Nigeria, a region in which in 2013 the Shehu Sanda Kyarimi Government Secondary School was attacked by Boko Haram terrorists. The artist first visited the school in 2017 to interact with a group of final year students when it had just been reopened after a two year closure triggered by the abduction of the Chibok girls. She held a series of performative workshops with the students in order to plot an area for playful interaction where the undefined can be stimulated without a direct imposition of meaning. This intent was inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage (1983), a montage of fleeting images from Senegal without narration, in which Trinh explains that she intends “not to speak about/Just speak nearby, ” unlike more conventional ethnographic documentary film. The intent of the series is not to directly approach this subject to extract useable information or to affirm a position in a traditional way, but rather to turn curiosities to the things that happen around the making of these images. Tatsuniya is about the intangible things that happen when you bring a group of young women together and hold space for creative expression to come through.
Tatsuniya Artist Collective is a registered organization that represents the 20 original student collaborators featured in the Tatsuniya series. The collective was founded through the visual storytelling workshops Rahima Gambo had with the student collaborators in the series. The collective is a gathering space where members can initiate projects, discuss issues, find support, resources and be sustained in the long-run by the Tatsuniya series. It is also a place where the parameters of long-term collaboration, agency, representation and authorship can be defined and mediated. Current members are; 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, Fatima Abatcha