The artwork, Secretum (I am very much in love w/u), comprises of double-jars in various dimensions, with the interior jars sometimes obscured with paper-tape.
Each exterior jar is well sealed and each label anchored with a security-band to indicate if the seal has been violated.
Each glass jar is a discrete individual exhibit of an incident captured in a jar and expressed through the idiosyncrasies of institutional labeling .
The Latin term Secretum is used to express the idea of a contained or jarred secret. Each label utilizes various languages simultaneously including english, french chinese, arabic and german.
All labels indicate sufficient information that allow the viewer to comprehend that something grave has occurred.
Each viewer is left to decipher the strategic-opacity of transparency provided through the obfuscatory methods of institutions, be they scientific, academic, media, government, religious or police.
The sub-title of this artwork is taken from an SMS text-message sent by a Cameroon citizen who found himself imprisoned for texting the following: "i am very much in love w/u" to someone of the same gender. He was imprisoned, brutalized and then later starved to death by his biological family (parents).
This project was created on the occasion of the 2014 Dakar Biennale (Biennale de l'art africain contemporain de dakar) by the invitation of Paris based curator Elise Atangana and her colleagues Abdelkader Damani and Smooth Ugochukwu Nzewi.
