Kollier Din-Bangura stood frozen under the African sun at the corner of Sani Abacha Street in Freetown, Sierra Leone, for more than two hours.
It was October 2020, just seven months after global COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns had begun. Din-Bangura gazed forward through an upside-down mask and dark sunglasses. Dressed in all black, hands extended, and forearms drenched in sweat, he appeared to onlookers to be praying, or meditating, or simply a neighborhood character. His brother stood feet away with a video camera.
This isn’t the first time Din-Bangura selected a city’s street corner on which to stand still for hours. He’s done this nine times in total – twice in London, a city he called home for 30 years before moving to New York City, as well as Paris and Beijing.
These acts of standing still serve as performance pieces for Din-Bangura. His latest performance found him returning to Sierra Leone, where he was born and lived until he was nine. The film for this piece, captured by his brother and titled They Don’t Know, was included in a June exhibition of Din-Bangura’s work in Harlem, New York.
“I arrived at Sani Abacha street after about a week of lobbying with the locals and showing my face around, making some friends locally, so they wouldn’t know me as an outsider,” he says. “Behind that mask, I wanted to say, ‘I’m just a son, a father, and your fellow human.’”
“Behind that mask, I wanted to say, ‘I’m just a son, a father, and your fellow human.’”
His purpose was to introduce his community to his work through a different kind of performance. Instead of entertainment, Din-Bangura’s performance focused on discipline, perseverance, and even insanity. These ideas are reflected in the artist’s mantra and the title of his signature piece, Keep the Faith.
“At the end of the performance, I had a round of applause,” he says. “Some people, when I was walking away, started clapping because they respected the physicality of the performance.”
Perseverance is a theme for Din-Bangura’s latest exhibit, Murder was the Case, which he staged in his Harlem apartment on Convent Avenue from May 27 through June 26.
“The title came from a Snoop Dogg track which, at that time, was quite a pioneering video in terms of hip-hop,” he says.
A hip-hop reference to Snoop Dogg’s Murder Was The Case short film and soundtrack album is an interesting choice for the title of Din-Bangura’s latest show. The album’s title track reflects a transitionary period for the musician on his rise to superstardom, in which he chooses rap as an art form that can pull him out of his circumstances. Throughout this show, Din-Bangura appears to similarly reflect on his own experiences using art to navigate the challenges he’s faced as an immigrant living in New York City.
“Being alone and trying to keep my hopes alive and not having much money…the only way I felt I could overcome that in terms of healing was to put this show together, so I can also be a bit of hope to others,” he says.
Din-Bangura has a passion for others, often sketching the faces of loved ones and people he meets into his work. He is accommodating and polite, insisting on offering beverages to those who come through his apartment to see the show.
Din-Bangura has a passion for others, often sketching the faces of loved ones and people he meets into his work. He is accommodating and polite, insisting on offering beverages to those who come through his apartment to see the show.
“I owned a cafe in Forest Hill (a borough in London),” he says. “The artists who frequented my cafe always said, ‘Bro, I think you’re an artist,’ because they saw my designs and how I put things together.”
He began producing his own work in 2016. By 2018, he says, “I felt there was no other way for me to have a voice. Now, I focus my life’s work on being the best I can be to share my story and to produce work that I feel can resonate to a lot of people.”
As viewers explore each room in Din-Bangura’s apartment, where he has resided with his wife and daughter for the past year, they are asked to “solve the murder.”
“I felt it was more radical and really allowed my audience to think a little bit more. Murder was the Case was a title that I felt would allow my viewers to ask questions,” he says. “People might think ‘A case? What’s happened?’ Nothing’s happened apart from art. A case that needed to be solved, without being too direct, I felt was the perfect ingredient as an artist.”
Illustrating the haunting nature of the title, much of Din-Bangura’s early work displayed throughout the show is done in chalk on trash bags draped over furniture, or with charcoal scribbled on pieces of cardboard found in the street. This work takes on an ephemeral quality evocative of New York City’s many street artists. In this way, meaning is derived from the process of creating the work rather than its preservation.
“When I moved to Convent Avenue, I didn’t have many options of mediums or material,” he says. “I found these cardboard pieces on 34th street. I asked for the nearest art supply, got some charcoal, and I went into the streets of Harlem and did these sketches.”
“When I moved to Convent Avenue, I didn’t have many options of mediums or material,” he says. “I found these cardboard pieces on 34th street. I asked for the nearest art supply, got some charcoal, and I went into the streets of Harlem and did these sketches.”
Din-Bangura managed to later “resourcefully borrow” – as he says – trash bags from a sanitation worker in Times Square.
“I said to the guy, ‘I’d like to use this as a medium to make art. Could you possibly gift me one of the bags?’” he explains. “He said to me at that time, ‘I can’t give it to you. I’ll lose my job. But if I walk away, maybe you can help yourself, and I’ll pretend it never happened.’ So that’s where the work on trash bags, especially the large trash bags, started.”
He says this work in particular reflects the idea of waste and excess in a large city like New York juxtaposed with feeling disposable or overlooked as a Black artist. While his current show’s metaphorical murder is left to viewers to solve, a display of works in Din-Bangura’s bedroom addressing issues of race, culture, and migration alludes to the fears and challenges of immigrants and artists being priced out of New York’s neighborhoods.
“Even though I moved from the U.K. to New York, I also feel I’ve faced the same challenges other immigrant artists face in terms of being as resourceful as I can through my work to try to establish myself so I can have an opportunity,” he says.
Din-Bangura relocated to New York City with his wife and daughter in September of 2021 on the back of the pandemic, and due to rising rents, has made the difficult decision to leave New York and return to London this year.
“We signed a year’s lease,” he says. “Even despite the day-to-day cost of living in New York, we managed to pay our rent, mostly on time.”
At the beginning of this year, however, their lease was not renewed and rising rents had made it impossible for them to stay.
“I think our story resonates with a lot of immigrants,” he says. “You have to start all over again from scratch.”
Perhaps one of the most impactful elements of the exhibit is a display in his daughter’s bedroom. The brightest room in the apartment contains her toys and play sets, as well as a fake eviction notice made out to a John Doe. Din-Bangura hopes his work speaks to artists facing these challenges.
Perhaps one of the most impactful elements of the exhibit is a display in his daughter’s bedroom. The brightest room in the apartment contains her toys and play sets, as well as a fake eviction notice made out to a John Doe.
“I hope I can be a testament of courage and faith,” he says. “I want to speak on behalf of all artists like myself.”
Despite his upcoming departure from the city, the first piece he created after moving to New York is displayed on a chair in the apartment’s most central location – its living room. It’s a piece titled Solomon Behave, and it’s about his block. Din-Bangura’s art studio is just on the other side of the wall, with its single window framing the street sign for Convent Avenue. His desk sits in front of it. The home he’s now leaving served as the first reference point for his life as an artist in New York City.
“At the time, it was snowing outside, and there was a car parked on the street,” he says. “That was the first piece I did. I thought, ‘Let’s just give it a try. Let’s try it out.’ Especially with the medium – the trash bags and the paint – I wasn’t sure whether it would work. So I hung the bag, and I didn’t have a subject to paint, so I just looked outside the window at that lamp post and the Convent Avenue sign.”
His latest performance piece also plays on a loop in his living room and appears to be one of the strongest testaments to his mantra of keeping the faith in times of struggle. Din-Bangura says the economic activity and hunger for survival that permeates Sani Abacha Street made it the perfect setting to explore these issues of ancestry, migration, and capitalism. In this commercial section of Freetown, Sierra Leone, his performance was initially met with criticism.
“The street sellers, when I arrived, started calling me [a name that means] ‘half salt, half sugar.’ It means half there, half not there,” he says. “All of the things people were selling were secondhand things shipped from abroad – secondhand clothing, secondhand shoes. For me, the cry for Africans is, ‘When can we also start producing? Apart from our livelihood being made out of secondhand goods or goods being shipped from abroad, where are we in terms of our standing in the modern world?’”
“For me, the cry for Africans is, ‘When can we also start producing? Apart from our livelihood being made out of secondhand goods or goods being shipped from abroad, where are we in terms of our standing in the modern world?’”
In an effort to flip the narrative of feeling disposable and instead begin to produce original work, Din-Bangura wore his mask upside down during the performance. He says it also served as a way of protesting the current understanding of globalization, currency, and resources.
“Standing still for me was the strongest action of resistance to raise awareness,” he says. “Hence the title, They Don’t Know. By standing still, I was asking the question: Who was crazy? The man in the upside-down mask, or the participants exchanging in business activity?”
As he speaks, Din-Bangura sometimes alternates between English and Krio – an English-based creole spoken mainly in Sierra Leone in West Africa.
“I’ve always said if you really understand it properly, it tickles you. That’s how playful the language is,” he says. “It’s the mother tongue. It’s where the people come from. It’s very jovial and very provocative, very fun loving, but also very expressive and impassioned.”
Consequently, so is Din-Bangura’s work, with a storytelling element woven throughout. He often writes upside down and backwards, leaving messages for viewers to decode in his paintings, which have evolved out of trash bags and cardboard to canvas and paper.
“One of the things I enjoy when I’m back in Sierra Leone is speaking to the younger generation and seeing how the language has changed,” he says. “It makes me really happy. In terms of home, never forget it. It comes with your ancestry and your identity.”
The transient character of his native language is evident in his work, appearing even in the setting for this exhibit – an apartment he will soon leave vacant for a new tenant. Of the many polaroids Din-Bangura snapped of those who viewed the show, he says a single blank polaroid in which his camera ran out of film is his favorite. It speaks to an ongoing story beyond what can be seen. The story he hopes viewers are left with is that he is a killer. A metaphorical one, anyway.
“I’ve killed love. I’ve killed opportunities,” he says. “Murder was the Case is a way to reaffirm my mantra of keeping the faith and my surrender in terms of looking for new beginnings. It’s a way to reference courage and finding a way through my work to speak about my journey. And I hope my work strikes a match for a wider audience. I feel sometimes my work can be quite confrontational in terms of what can be perceived as beauty.”
