I am You

I am You (2025) is now showing at Human Marks: Tattooing in Contemporary Art at Joseloff Gallery in Hartford, CT.

I am You: Cartographies of Connection (2025) engages with the ritual of tattooing to create connected symbols inspired by water which honour the intimate friendship between two participants, Jamila and Randa. This 2 channel video installation is part of the ongoing project, I am You.

Many people use tattoos as a marker of belonging, with symbols and shapes relating to specific stories, cultures, experiences and spaces. This indigenous ritual supports our connections with ourselves, our bodies and our communities. My experiences tattooing and being tattooed have shown me that this craft can provide a consensual space for people to reclaim agency over their own bodies. It is a transformative and cathartic process that facilitates self-expression and embodied healing.

Rethinking common narratives in the West about connection and love, in which one person ‘completes’ the other, this work opens a space for us to consider ourselves as whole and to consider what shapeshifting takes places when we come together: belonging to ourselves and being in connection with ourselves can form a foundation for honest connection with another.

Using tattooing to explore these themes of connection and belonging, pairs of participants are invited to receive tattoos that relate to each other. Operating as a thread that connects the two, each tattoo is a unique, abstract, flowing shape connects with the other participant’s tattoo. The tattoos are offered as unique pairs and are drawn by hand for each participant.

Director, Editor, Photographer, Tattoo Artist: Gesiye
Participants: Jamila Versi & Randa Toko
Creative Producer: Hamed Maiye
Cinematographer: Adenike Oke
Colourist: Dedula Kumalo
Original Music by Avila Do Espírito Santo

This ongoing tattoo offering is inspired by the Mayan expression ‘In Lak’ech Ala K’in’ which can been translated as ‘I am the other you,’ or to ‘I am you, you are me.’

The tattoos that I am offering for this series of works are inspired by my experience of growing up on an islands and the water that surrounds us. For the past few years I have been developing an abstract linework technique in my tattooing practice that is based on the movement of water. The shapes that I create for I am You, are completed shapes that have no beginning or end which look like islands or small bodies of water.

The first public iteration of this series took place at Express Newark on June 10th 2023 and a 2 channel video installation for this project was commissioned by Carrie Cushman for Joseloff Gallery and opened on September 11th 2025. This ongoing project has included participants in the US, the UK, Germany and Trinidad & Tobago. Some of these tattoos are offered in a way that invites the public to be a witness to the connections being memorialised and others take place in more intimate settings. My intention is to create an interdisciplinary work that celebrates the ritual of tattooing. People who are 18 years old or older are welcome to join this project, please feel free to reach out if you are interested in participating in this work.