TJ Benson is a self-taught visual artist and photographer based in Kaduna, Nigeria. He started training in drawing and photography with his father, a multidisciplinary artist and photographer who bought him a Kodak film camera before he passed just before Tj’s eleventh birthday. He resumed his practice in 2013 and got commissioned by a publisher to produce a photobook titled ‘Self.’ His work has been longlisted for the Kuehenyia prize and has been exhibited at the Institut Francais, Abuja, Photocarrefour, and the Alliance Francaise, Lagos.

In engaging the theme of the project, I thought to address the different borders we encounter, both geographical but also mental as how we navigate these borders shape our experience. There can be no contending with borders without journeys and the images ‘Woman on the Bridge’ and ‘Wander’ speak to this. To contend with borders we may have to leave what we know.

There are also more abstract borders to engage with and it excites me to see young Africans reaching beyond the borders of time to relearn their nearly disappeared cultural heritage in ‘Seeing’. My work also covers with what ‘Rest’ means for the millenial body contending with borders and how storytelling and ‘Reaching’ for each other beyond the borders of our personal experiences ‘At the Border of thought’ can help us imagine better futures.

Our paths are different but the journeying is similar and however different we might me, there might be something familiar to find in the face of a ‘Stranger Outside Town’. Borders can be the place we wait for something to come come to us or for change to happen ‘Longing’ or a place we can rest and reconfigure our strategy ‘A Body will Always Bend into a Story.’

I interpret ‘Nightman’ as the custodian of dreams at the borders of consciousness and sleep.