Asmaa Jama with Gouled Ahmed: Except this time nothing comes back from the ashes

10 Jun-10 Sep 2023

Overview

A new film commission by Asmaa Jama, developed in collaboration with artist and costume designer Gouled Ahmed. Shot in Addis Ababa, the film follows ghostly, glitchy presences haunting a city. Inspired by African photography studios, the work explores self-portraiture, archive and memory to consider who is excluded from institutionalised national narratives.

ASMAA JAMA
Asmaa Jama is a Somali artist and poet based in Bristol. In 2021, Jama was shortlisted for the Brunel African Poetry Prize and the Wasafiri Writing Prize, and longlisted to the National Poetry Competition. Jama is a Cave Canem 2021 Fellow.

Jama’s work has been published in magazines and journals such as Poetry Review, The Good Journal, Ambit, Ballast and Magma and translated into French, German, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish and Swahili. Her writing has been commissioned by Arnolfini (Bristol), Hayward Gallery (London) and Ifa gallery (Brussels). As a film director, Asmaa was commissioned by BBC Arts to make the interactive film Before We Disappear (2021), and by Bristol Old Vic to make The Season of Burning Things (2021), which was screened at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2021), as part of 100 Ways to say We. Both films were made with costume designer Gouled Ahmed, as part of an ongoing creative collaboration.

GOULED ABDISHAKOUR AHMED
Gouled Abdishakour Ahmed is an artist, stylist, costume designer and writer. Their work explores themes of memory, belonging and futurity using self-portraiture and self-fashioning as a tool to challenge traumatic histories and interrogate how structures of power have created meaning in how the ‘other’ is seen and understood in the Horn of Africa.

They collaborated with Asmaa Jama on Before We Disappear, an interactive moving image piece commissioned by BBC Arts, and The Season of Burning Things, an experimental film commissioned by Bristol Old Vic (2021).

Abdishakour Ahmed features in the documentary The Ones Who Keep Walking, commissioned by Johnnie Walker, and their work has been shown widely at venues such as V&A Museum, London (2022); Alliance Ethio-Francaise, Addis Ababa (2021); Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2021); Northstar Church of the Arts, Durham (2019); ZOMA Museum, Addis Ababa (2018); Guramayle Art Center, Addis Ababa (2018); Asni Art Gallery, Addis Ababa (2018); Lela Art Gallery, Addis Ababa (2018); and Africa Center, London (2017).

Ahmed graduated with a degree in History from Bard College, New York (2015) and received the Prince Claud Fund’s Seed Awards (2022) and the African Cultural Fund’s Visual Arts Grant, Bamako, Mali (2020). Ahmed, is also an artist-in-residence, at Black Rock Senegal (2022).