Biography
Since 2021, Asmaa Jama, an artist and poet, and Gouled Ahmed, a costume designer and stylist, have been evolving a collaborative practice that encompasses photography, costume design, styling, poetry and painting. Attesting to their shared heritage as Somali-origin artists, their practice entails imagining futures and building alternative worlds using an audio-visual language that resists normative storytelling techniques by using visual text, moving images and metaphors. Their interactive works explore migration, rituals, mythmaking, hypervisibility, invisibility, erasure, surveillance and the archiving of memory.
The duo draws from their individual approaches to artmaking. Jama interrogates language to probe nuances of migration and transience and to materialise memory, while Ahmed uses self-portraiture and self-fashioning techniques to questionthe influence of structural hierarchies on how the ‘other’ is seen and understood in the Horn of Africa.
Commissioned by BBC Art, Before We Disappear (2021), was their first collaborative moving image piece. Subsequent works include Except this time nothing comes back from the ashes (2022), commissioned by Spike Island, and The Season of Burning Things (2021), commissioned by the Bristol Old Vic. Their work has also been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021).
Jama is a 2021 Starshine and Clay Fellow awarded by Cave Canem and the EcoTheo Collective, and an inaugural alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation. They were shortlisted and received an Honourable Mention for the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2021).
Ahmed received the Prince Claus Seed Award (2022) and is an artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal, Dakar (2022). They graduated with a degree in History from Bard College, New York (2015).
Born in 1998 in Aalborg, Denmark, Jama currently lives and works in Bristol.
Ahmed was born in 1992 in Djibouti and currently lives and works in Addis Ababa.