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Umulkhayr Mohamed (they/he/she) is a Welsh Somali artist, writer, curator, and radical educator who produces work under the alias Aisha Ajnabi, their 'art other'.
His art is the place where they are able to join the practising of spirituality rooted in animism and ancestral honouring with her politic grounded in solidarity and liberation.
Creatively, he is excited by exploring the tension present between enjoying the act of meandering through emancipatory temporalities and feeling the need to position oneself in the now so as to remain relevant. As a result of this tension she has honed a way of producing work that is multilayered, nuanced, and provides multiple inroads into the work’s core, which itself is often of real and/or imagined dichotomies.
Their artistic practice has never been tied to specific themes, as they have made works about historical figures, the concept of mapping, and material culture connected to bricks, amongst other themes. Nor has it been contained to a single medium as she has created text, sound, installation, artist moving image and performance works.
That being said Umulkhayr can gather the work that he produces into three groupings, each with a specific Nucleus, Temporality, and Tone. These groups are as follows;
Cultural - Historical - Reparative,
Material - Present - Reverent,
and Self - Speculative - Liberatory.
Umulkhayr equally values the archive, conversation and embodied experiences as sources of wisdom, and the work that comes from this practice they have in the past described as equal parts a poetic distillation of this research and a call in search of a response as his approach to artmaking is inherently collaborative.
Umulkhayr Mohamed (they/he/she) is a Welsh Somali artist, writer, curator, and radical educator who produces work under the alias Aisha Ajnabi, their 'art other'.