Rahima Gambo is a Nigerian visual artist who came to artistic practice from photojournalism and by working independently on long form documentary projects.
2023 Biennial Year Find out more
She explores the experimental and conceptual territory between still and moving images as it intersects with documentary, psychogeography, socio-politics, ecology, and autobiography. Her practice ranges from drawing, video, sculpture, installation and sound, using them as extended poetic and speculative tools that enquire around documentary processes that lie outside pre-existing traditions.
Selected exhibitions include Bird Sound Orientations 2, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, Bird Sound Orientations 1, Stevenson Gallery Johannesburg, “Have you seen a Horizon Lately?” MACAAL, Morocco. The 11th and 12th Edition Recontre de Bamako, the Biennale of African photography, Mali. Mercosur Biennial, 12th edition—Feminine(s): visualities, actions and affections.
Liverpool Biennial 2023
‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ (2021)
Continuing Gambo’s practice of walking and wandering as a framework to weave a story, these works explore the origins of language, embodied and multisensory communication, and speculative storytelling. The work is underpinned by improvisation and an open-ended approach that places video clips on a timeline like found objects in an assemblage, or words in a cut-up poem.
Coming from a photo-journalism background, here Gambo proposes urgent embodied alternatives for the documentary storytelling form, one that centres materiality and works made by hand. Found objects, sculpted brass, copper and clay instruments are animated and sounded on the video timeline as signifiers for the untranslatable substances that defy capture or understanding.
The video and installation become soft containers for holding an ephemeral recording of
Continuing Gambo’s practice of walking and wandering as a framework to weave a story, these works explore the origins of language, embodied and multisensory communication, and speculative storytelling. The work is underpinned by improvisation and an open-ended approach that places video clips on a timeline like found objects in an assemblage, or words in a cut-up poem. Coming from a photo-journalism background, here Gambo proposes urgent embodied alternatives for the documentary storytelling form, one that centres materiality and works made by hand. Found objects, sculpted brass, copper and clay instruments are animated and sounded on the video timeline as signifiers for the untranslatable substances that defy capture or understanding. The video and installation become soft containers for holding an ephemeral recording of travelling across a particular rural environment in Laongo, Burkina Faso, where the artist spent three months in 2020. The works reject standardised and normative forms of communication, using movement, symbols, signs, gesturing, tracing and silence as preferred modes of understanding the world. Alongside birdsong and her footsteps, the immersive soundtrack features the sound of a folk Fulani flute played by Kaito Winse – a griot (a West African storyteller) and musician from Burkina Faso.
‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ (2021)
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Rahima Gambo, ‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ and ‘Instruments of Air’, 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
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Rahima Gambo, ‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ and ‘Instruments of Air’, 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
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Rahima Gambo, ‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ and ‘Instruments of Air’, 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
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Rahima Gambo, ‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ and ‘Instruments of Air’, 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Open Eye Gallery. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
