Osman Yousefzada

Osman Yousefzada's practice revolves around modes of storytelling, merging autobiography with fiction and ritual. His work is concerned with the representation and rupture of the migrational experience, making reference to the socio-political issues of today — explored through moving image, installation, text works, sculpture, garment making and performance.

His practice is described as auto-ethnographic, where personal stories become political. South Asian influences are what many might first see when they encounter his work, but it reaches far broader — unravelling pressing issues of global histories, colonialities, class and race. Osman Yousefzada consistently refuses easy categorisation: his bodies, objects and textiles are presented as part-things that resist fixed identity, insisting instead on the complexity of lives lived across borders.

Central to his methodology is the figure of his mother — a talented seamstress whose domestic making practice Osman Yousefzada has openly acknowledged as a foundational artistic source. His work is both symbolic of the precarious nature of immigrants' lives, and a tender and complex portrait of a loved one and, by extension, himself. This intimacy sits alongside a boldly political register: his installation When Will We Be Good Enough? drew links between colonial sea routes and the underwater cables that carry today's digital information — both, he argues, viaducts of power.