Osman Yousefzada's (b. 1977 Birmingham, UK) is a British interdisciplinary artist and writer. His practice revolves around modes of storytelling, merging autobiography with fiction and ritual. Yousefzada's work is concerned with the representation and rupture of the migrational experience and makes reference to socio-political issues of today. These themes are explored through moving image, installations, text works, sculpture, garment making and performance.
Yousefzada's contemporary art practice has been described as "defiant", where the participating bodies throughout his work are presented as part objects that refuse to identify or conform. Most recently, his series of solo interventions titled What Is Seen & What Is Not was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London. Across three site-specific works, this commission responded to the 75th anniversary of Pakistan independence and explored themes of displacement, movement, migration, and climate change. Yousefzada exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, a solo show hosted by the V&A and the Fondazione Berengo at the Palazzo Franchetti.
In his first book, The Go-Between (2022), set in Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s, alternative masculinities compete with strict gender roles while female erasure and honour-based violence are committed, even as empowering female friendships prevail. This book was long listed for the Polari Prize, winning the Slightly Foxed memoir prize and reviewed by Stephen Fry as "one of the greatest childhood memoirs of our time."
Yousefzada is a research practitioner at the Royal College of Art, London and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at international institutions including: Palazzo Franchetti in conjunction with the 60th Venice Biennale; Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford; Charleston, Firle; British Ceramics Biennale, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke on Trent; Cromwell Place, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Institutional group exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Camden Art Centre; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Lahore Museum, Pakistan; Wapping Project, London; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Ringling Museum, Florida; Design Museum, London; Lahore Biennale, Pakistan; and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh.