In his novel “Foreign Gods Inc.” by Okey Ndibe, the main character visits a friend of his in his hometown in Nigeria.  His friend has become rich, and his way of sharing that wealth with the community was to build an extra living room to his house, where people could come and sit in the air conditioning and watch old Michael Jordan videos.  He called it a “poor people’s tv room” and that inspired the title of this work—this idea of providing a room where someone else’s aspirations were always on a loop, a space set “alongside time,” rather than in it.

Inspired by the events of the Woman’s War of 1929 in southeastern Nigeria, the “Bring Back Our Girls Movement”in 2014 and the movement for Black Lives (BLM) in the US in 2014, this work considers how protest movements are durational acts. These acts transmit embodied knowledge through generations and across continents, even when cultural histories have been suppressed. This work explores the relationship between these durational acts and performance practice.

This installation is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.