In early 2010, I was hit by a car while riding a motorbike in Dar es Salaam. The impact shattered every bone in my right leg. I received six transfusions and was later told that this — the blood of unknown others — saved me from dying from internal bleeding. That night, in the middle of surgery, I woke up with complete amnesia — no knowledge of who, or even what, I was. Just a speck of consciousness floating in empty, black space. I slowly came back into my body, and when I could finally move again the pain tore through me and I was returned to oblivion.

This installation revisits my near-death experience and its aftermath, with different textures and materials mirroring the physical and psychic fabric of that night — the wet asphalt, the broken bike and body, scattered glass, terror and pain, the chasm between before and after…

It rejects a two-dimensional format and instead requires the viewer to enter and become immersed in the piece itself. The viewer cannot see the whole at once, nor its end, but exists within it — an encounter with death, the subconscious, and the shadow of unseen dimensions lurking at the edge.

As the car crashed into me, I felt a sense of peeling, possible lives splitting apart — the thin moment of separation between nearly missing and sighing with relief, and flying upwards, over, landing, begging please-god-no, the curb beneath my neck, leg exploded, bike twisted on itself with its dimming lights still on. Despite recovery and my sense of survival, I can’t outrun the memory of that night and the feeling that a part of me has already gone on. This piece is a confrontation and a return, an act of seeking and demanding an audience with that escaped and injured fragment of soul.

Installation using chicken wire, black fabric, VHS tape, plastic dolls, plastic bags, broken glass, coated wire
225 x 98 inches

Taboo, Nafasi Art Space, Dar es Salaam
Group Exhibition, December 2018