FUFU PRESS & THEATRE IS OVER THERE is pleased to announce the publication of our nth book:
#1.New publication:
In 2014, a series of particularly devastating events took place in the neighbourhood of Nyanya in Nigeria's state capital Abuja. Epiphany At Nyanya is a keeping to memory by circumventing the subject through the object: the car and its im/material implosion. The source of 'the imploded car' is the (already heavily mediated) 'reported image', such that the layers of colours added by the artist seem purposeless, even whimsical hiding. To the artist, making these images under the collectif, THANKSTHANKSAFRICA, the so-called unnecessary colouration give the (overly consumed) subject a breather as well embalm forever, for herself at least, the events and their material conditions she feared are too soon forgotten. — PEOPLE WITH NO COUNTRY, 2023The now defunct THANKSTHANKSAFRICA (TTA) was established as a fictional collective by Isoje Chou. The images in the book were initially intended for installation.
When in April of this year car bombings took place in Nigeria it was a complete shock and so out of place with the Nigeria we knew, it changed forever how one thought about the country of our childhood. Epiphany At Nyanya is about the abstracted images we began to create from news media reports of the bombings. Concrete reality, like concrete images—like car bombs extremism at the motor park—is hardly the sum of or any truer reality. A car set on fire is a tangible fact of its burning, with specific details of warped panels engulfed in blazing red flames. The sensory alarm of lost lives is more acute in the sound of horror that the report images contain. Do these distortions via heavily drenched colours mute that terrible sound or merely amplify it? Even from a distance of 3000miles, images amplify the sounds of places known to us, much less their destruction. Do these renderings distance us from the sounds of the reported images that haunted us for days as we wondered that home closes itself off ever more? In playing so unnecessarily with the found images, perhaps we wanted to put to memory events too quickly forgotten by the entire country. These are cars as weapons of terror and discontent rendered abstracted and stylized. Our misery ordered into a kind of contemplation.
— THANKSTHANKSAFRICA, 2014