Rahima Gambo
Tatsuniya
February 8, 2018
Tatsuniya (Hausa for fable or short story) builds upon Rahima Gambo's award-winning multimedia project Education is Forbidden which innovatively chronicles student experiences living at the forefront of the Boko Haram conflict. The video, in its non-linear and disjointed sequence, goes beyond the narrative of combat and trauma and touches on the essence of youthfulness and play at the core of the students' collective memory. Exploring the relationship between text, audio, moving and still images Gambo creates an room-sized installation comprised of over 45 live palm trees. Viewers navigate through glowing branches and across a dirt filled floor to view scenes from Shehu Sanda Kyarimi School in Maiduguri. As students remember their experiences living at the forefront of the Boko Haram conflict, with a direct attack in 2013, their stories sound like dark folktales situated somewhere between the real and the imagined and yet they also continue to embody a deep sense of youthfulness, innocence and play.
Rahima Gambo is an independent documentary photographer and visual storyteller who explores themes of postcolonial Nigerian identity, gender, history, memory and socio-political issues through long-term visual projects. Rahima is a 2014 Magnum Foundation Fellow and is an International Women's Media Foundation Fellow. She was a winner in the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award 2016.