Private view 20th March 6:30-8:30pm
Cooke Latham Gallery are delighted to present a solo exhibition by Osman Yousefzada.
I want to be more
than you will let me
Again
I turn off the light
I stand still
The sweat colours my throat
And I eat my tongue
Poem by Osman Yousefzada (written by hand on the gallery wall)
Osman Yousefzada is a consummate storyteller, artist and poet who uses object and word to tell migrant stories that are both autobiographical and allegorical. Cooke Latham Gallery is annexed to a family home, I hear her breathing is Yousefzada's response to the unseen (but sometimes heard) domestic rituals that take place across the divide of the gallery wall. The home is acknowledged as an arena that is at once both intensely personal and inherently universal. Also, a safe space, a space from which you can dream.
Scattered across the gallery floor are groupings of 'wrapped' ceramic objects, a homage to the plastic or material wrapped items brought to the United Kingdom by Yousefzada's mother when his family immigrated from Pakistan. Their supple folds and the idiosyncrasy of the knots that tie them are cast in clay; miniature monuments to the unseen women that wrapped them. Forever unopened they embody the idea of deferred enjoyment within immigrant communities and, perhaps, the reality of never having fully 'arrived'.
Part of a series made for Yousefzada's V&A exhibition What is Seen & What is Not in 2022 these ceramics, like much of Yousefzada's practice, purposefully defy easy categorisation. Compared by Jaspar Joseph-Lester (in an accompanying essay) to the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, he describes how "These small cast forms might be thought of as anti-Christos in that they refuse to be defined by the material objects they appear to conceal". The viewer is less preoccupied with what lies within, than by the absent hands that wrapped, transported and deemed these hidden objects precious; by the quiet acts of agency they signified within a predominantly patriarchal space.
These absent hands are mirrored in the disembodied voice that permeates the installation. An audio work, performed by the vocalist Ganavya, it can be heard before entering the gallery (and, perhaps, long after one has left). Intimate and languorous it seems, in part, a hummed accompaniment to domestic chores, to the cleansing of home or self. It can also be heard as a lament, a tribute to generations of women that have not had public voices, to their resilience and indomitable strength.
Installed from the central beams of the gallery, Sleeper I, hangs like an inverted bed, a quilt suspended from the beams. The work is a patchwork of found materials, one of which, Corchorus (otherwise known as jute), was cultivated and extracted under the British Empire. Tethered to a personal history in which Yousefzada's grandparents farmed similar 'cash crops', Sleeper I refers to the materials we choose not to see, asking us to 'lie' in that bed, acknowledging the unseen stories of which it is comprised. It's title not only references the bed, a site of dreaming and potential futures, but also the colloquial idea of something or someone being a 'sleeper'. The undervalued entity that lies unseen but in the public eye.
Around the walls are hung three Apsara, a name given to female spirits of the clouds and waters within Hindu and Buddhist culture. Hybrid works they combine collage, sewing and paint and depict a series of fiercely dancing figures. In many ways these dancers contain the gender ambiguity and fauvist palette of Matisse's dancers, however in their multiplicity of limbs they also relay the tornado like force of the Dervish or Jinn. Geographically untethered the works purposefully speak to no one heritage or visual language. Where there is a modesty to the ceramics, a quiet but contained defiance, the tapestries are the inverse, figures untethered to this world, agitators, their hair shaken loose.
Threads unravel from these jinn-like figures and pool in the bottom of their frames. Yousefzada's stories similarly reject the constraints of a single linear reading, instead multiple narrative threads weave and split throughout the installation. There is an anarchy in their interpretation, a demand to be heard in all their complexity. His practice recognises the politics of taxonomy, that to be classified is to be reduced. These are conceptually slippery objects and purposefully so.
The title of the exhibition was adapted from a radical lecture given by Arundhati Roy "The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."
In I hear her breathing Yousefzada tells stories and reveals hidden histories through the mediums of ceramic, textile, film and sound. Alternate futures are alluded to, and the murmurs of change begin to be heard. A myriad of alternate tomorrows, tantalisingly close; perhaps just the other side of the wall.
