My Son is Selling Bread in America

Photo: A|L Archives

Artist Tunde Wey’s public performance titled, My Son is Selling Bread in America, features the artist in a full body suit, embellished with fabrications of capitalism’s reward: glitter and gold. The artist is a visitor from a future, where disaster has created what resembles a prehistory. A place where growth is cancerous and celebrated. The artist masquerades as a future relocated street hawker, selling Agege Bread, a Nigerian-style bread, in an American city. The artist appears in a sedate or tumultuous neighborhood location and makes public remarks on the plasticness of society. The masquerading artist is an errand boy arriving from a party there, to deliver a message to would-be customers: their present, with its self-driving clean fuel technology cars and on demand entertainment and energy, is not the future. The future is well made bread sold at inflationary prices.