Honouring legacy of Bob Collymore
At the exhibition, a numbing effect hits you when you look at photos capturing the wardrobe of former Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore a week after he died. The shirts appear to be draped in melancholy. The shoes look like they are weeping. The ties are in full gaiety, full colour, but somehow there is a missing sheen.
Then it is the stomach-churning déjà vu when you look at the prescriptions he got from various hospitals in his battle with cancer. Nothing to ever smile about when you see hospital sheets and the cryptic doctor’s handwriting mentioning a drug or 20.
Then there are images taken from the window of Mr Collymore’s hospital isolation room, taken every day for 30 days. They give a glimpse of how everyone is on a different orbit. Some are inside suffering; others are out there thriving.
Then there are the sanguine clock faces captured in the wards Mr Collymore lay in during his final days, somehow an emblem of how Father Time and Mother Nature operate in connivance.
A fresh thud
By the time you come to Mr Collymore’s white shirts aka “Safaricom uniform”: not one, not two; but seven of them, you have gone through a roller-coaster of emotions. Mr Collymore’s death on July 1, 2019 hits you with a fresh thud.
But you also get a strange calming feeling.
And that is because this is not just a show about what Mr Collymore left behind. It is not a Collymore memorial service. It is a conversion of some of Mr Collymore’s items into a work of art that relays the process of grief.
‘Foreign Script’ at the ‘All my Venus Days’ exhibition by Wambui Collymore.
The title of this art exhibition is ‘All My Venus Days’ and the artist behind it is Wambui Wamae Kamiru Collymore, the corporate leader’s widow.
“Venus days” because while it takes just 24 hours for the sun to return to its initial position as Earth rotates, in Venus it is not just 24 hours; it takes 116 earth days.
“A day feels like 116 days in it when you are grieving,” says Wambui.
It is a work of art because the hospital sheets don’t just carry the prescriptions. On them are written musical notes in permanent ink. These are the notes Mr Collymore would use when practising on his saxophone.
Once the doctor’s writings fade away, the notes will remain.
“The prescription is printed on carbon copy and as we know, carbon copies fade over time. The prescription will fade and what will be left are the notes that Bob played — sort of metaphorical of his life,” says Wambui.
Shirts
Even the shirts are not just shirts. On the right breast of each, a message is embroidered using a green thread. This spot, Wambui writes in the descriptions, is where she last felt Mr Collymore’s heartbeat.
One reads: “There is freedom in deep sadness, when one reaches a point of ‘I don’t care.’”
Another says: “And perhaps there is beauty in that he left and was not taken from me. But that doesn’t take away the fact that I miss him so deeply.”
White being one of Safaricom’s corporate colours, Mr Collymore wore the shirts to blend in.
‘Veil of Grief’ at the art exhibition.
“He had many other shirts, but he liked his white ones,” she says, adding that the green thread used for the embroidery was also chosen on purpose.
“As I was debating on the colours to use, I decided to use green because Bob actually did bleed Safaricom; that is the colour he bled,” she says.
Another section of the exhibition asks the attendant to sit down and reflect on a person or thing they have lost. Then a pen and paper are provided, where one can write a message and clip it on the “veil of grief” inside.
Read: Life after Bob Collymore
A number of attendants have penned heartfelt messages. Wambui wants those attending to bring passport-size photos of people or things they are mourning.
“It’s all about all of us recognising that loss is a very human thing,” she says. “Like I keep saying, you’re lucky if you have grief, because it means that you have loved and you have lost.”
The exhibition opened on February 5 and will run till March 5. It opens on Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 5pm at Tira Studio near Ngong Racecourse.
The location of the exhibition room is interesting because it is upstairs. Underneath, there are workshops and restaurants, and the noise from them adds to the buffet, albeit irregularly. It turns out there is a specific reason why the exhibition — done in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and Tira Art Studio — is happening on Ngong Road.
Furniture workshop
“This space we are in was originally a furniture workshop. So, if you came here like three weeks ago, you’d have found work benches, sawdust, workmen, work machines,” says Wambui.
“The reason I chose to put it in a furniture workshop was because on Sundays, Bob enjoyed walking along Ngong Road. This exhibition had to be on Ngong Road, because he loved walking and talking to the people who were building furniture. And it would be a surprise visit. He would spend Sunday afternoons looking at the furniture pieces; reason being he also used to make furniture,” she adds.
But why did she decide to have the exhibition now? Wambui says she felt she had “stagnated” as an artist.
“The show was supposed to be held last year in February, but I kept pushing it back. I didn’t feel like I was ready to share it yet, but then I realised that if I don’t share it, all the other creative work was not coming through because this was kind of blocking that world from coming through,” she says.
And why did she choose to display such personal items to the public?
“The reason I have chosen to do so is because this is my form of expression. I am an artist. That’s something that I am; and it’s something that I live,” she says.
She goes on: “It’s also because he wasn’t just mine. I think he belonged to all of us. I wanted to bring my community into the work.”
Actually, she had been in such an initiative when Mr Collymore was alive. Nation readers will remember full-page adverts that ran in the obituary pages where illustrations of hands clasped in supplication were printed with the title “Prayer for Jeremy” or somebody else. It was Wambui’s brainchild.
Obituary pages
“It was a five-day campaign that ran in the obituary pages as a form of public art and it was in recognition of children who had died in difficult circumstances,” she says.
As you leave the exhibition room, while an old-fashioned projector ticks to project images on a screen, you are left reflecting deep within. And with a reminder that all of us are on earth for only a short while.
Particularly, the first slide in the presentation, which tells attendants that this is an installation about the processing of grief, is haunting.
It reads in part: “This work documented a period of nine months initially and then two years of a period of mourning (that) provided the artist the opportunity to interrogate the experience of grief.”
Mr Collymore died about two years after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, a type of cancer that interferes with the production of blood cells in the body.
The exhibition brings a stark reminder of Mr Collymore, who had wished to be buried with minimal fanfare. “Some people have broken down and cried within the (exhibition) space,” says Wambui.
“It’s a difficult show. I would say it’s a heavy show; it’s quite intense. But that’s the point; just being able to confront some of those emotions because life doesn’t always allow you to confront them,” she adds. BY DAILY NATION


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