This book is a component of Ask Yourself project, made by Amarachi Okafor in 2014. It is a communication agent that documents the voices of the project's participating public or audiences. Ask Yourself is an art of sensitisation as a catalyst for positive change that posed as a game providing audiences the opportunity on many levels, to have a think/a rethink about our individual contribution to this society where we belong. The single artwork comprised: Painting, Artist-books, Installation, Film.
How do we live? How do we affect things and other people by the ways that we act? What can we individually do to improve everything? Okafor's work aims at collective societal positive transformation. When we can look inwards to ourselves first, then chances are that we may want to start growing ideas and methods for constructive change towards achieving an admirable society. Ask Yourself at its' first engagement worked actively with up to 400 people as collaborators, assistants, volunteers and participants.
Click the following link to view the book:
Ask Yourself (Scroll down as necessary)
This 48 page volume is a documentation of the similarly named solo exhibition which was held at CCA Lagos in September 2021. Amarachi Okafor engages with the audience/participants to explore bags and boxes as agents of containment and control in and of themselves.
The artwork, The Colour of Our Hearts Is the Colour of Our City, 2015-2019 is people focused, and affectionately themed so. The one-piece exhibition was participatory (with audiences) and performative (by the audience and the artist). The physical sculpture installation brought to mind a city setting with pouches in seating as people living in clusters, on streets, within closed and open walls. Cities are made and built by people- all the people in it, not just some. Each one of us is a stakeholder and through our actions or/and inactions, we have the ability to affect the overall feel of our city in some capacity or other. Using individual bags as objects that aid us to think about the human being as entities that have the capacity to hold and to contain, may we bear in mind that we have the responsibility to be better, and to make better.
Click the following link to view the book:
The Colour of Our Hearts Is the Colour of Our City (Scroll down as necessary)