The guy behind me, on the wall, is Mustapha. Some people thought he was Theo from ‘The Cosby Show’, but he wasn’t…I was wandering around the front of the Tate Modern in London, a few years earlier, when I noticed this guy sitting at a portable card table he’d set up near one of the entrances. His table was covered in hundreds of postcards of all the same image - 9x5 photo portrait of himself. I recall picking up the card and turning it over. It read simply in the top left corner “Mustapha…La Nouvelle Sensation” ‘But what do you do Mustapha?’ I enquired. ‘I mean, are you an actor, or performance artist…?’ He shrugged, and simply sat and smiled the same wide grin. I must have bought a stack of these cards, as I remember us laughing and hugging it out. So, that’s how he ended up on the kitchen wall at the studio, blown up to XXXL. A massive smiling buddha, trying to teach me something simple, I had yet to comprehend.
I must have that postcard somewhere…
