Lot 26: DILOMPRIZULIKE

NIGERIA
The Flirts from the Installation Wear and Tear

74 3/4 x 61 in. (189.9 x 154.9 cm).

Found materials and wooden stand.

2000

London, Hayward Gallery, Salon Afrique: Wear and Tear Performance, March 8, 2005; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Contemporary Visual Culture of West Africa, 2005

Collection of the artist

“Junk is simply defined as what people have thrown away; what is nonsense, what doesn’t have value, what people can neglect or abuse without stepping on the toes of the law, what you can even pick and people will thank you for picking it. That’s what junk is all about. That’s what I work with. It began a long time ago. At least, my mother would still remember how she used to bring out pieces of different sort of things from my pockets in my early days in the primary school. And she would always express aloud, the fear of getting her fingers cut by some object while washing my clothes. At that stage, I was not using them for anything, except that I had this instinct to pick them. Rollo May, in his book The Courage To Create, puts it this way: “A painter paints with the same instinct with which a criminal commits a crime. That instinct is the instinct of the creative mind, of the creative artist. This was the instinct I had for junk. Then the picking developed into collecting. And now a bus is actually available to move junk to the junkyard anytime” (Dilomprizulike quoted in F. Macaulay, “ ...Why artists must be far from the madding crowd – Junkman.” The Sun – Voice of the Nation, 26 April 2006, reproduced online at http://www.sunnewsonline.com).