Furmaan Ahmed: The Pakistani designer behind your favourite sets

If you’ve ever stumbled across a campaign where your favourite artist lounges against what appears to be extraterrestrial debris—achingly cool, as if plucked from the wreckage of a future myth—chances are, you’re looking at the unmistakable artistry of Furmaan Ahmed. The Pakistani-Scottish artist whose work spans film, photography, costume, and set design, explores themes of archaeology, nationalism, and folklore, ornament, and futurism. From campaigns with Converse, Prada, and Nike, to designing sets for the likes of Travis Scott, Willow Smith, and Ravyn Lenae, Furmaan has scaffolded countless visions to reality. Dazed MENA speaks with Furmaan about their roots, the power of visibility, religious folklore, artistry, and all that’s to come for them. 

What inspired you to get into your craft? 

Making art came to me at a time when I think I really needed it. I was having a painful time trying to understand what home meant to me living in the Pakistani community of Glasgow during the early 2000s while also being gender non-conforming. I was living an extreme double life—how I would dress, how I would talk…The artist MIA was a huge inspiration to me then—she was such a reawakening—probably the only person in the media at the time who was verbalising all this stuff I was feeling inside and giving it agency. There weren’t really any mentors or elders or people like me in the media at the time. 

I think imagining stories and worlds was a therapy of sorts. As a teen I was mindlessly creating—costumes, sculptures, and sets out of trash and turning my bedroom into fantasy worlds—trying to find a new home that I was safe in. I told everyone at primary school my mum drove the limo for the Queen… Looking back it was pure childish escapism. I’d end up photographing and posting photos of myself in my bedroom on Tumblr…I documented myself in secret for years. 

I was taught very young that there’s nothing you can’t fix with a piece of string or some tape from my grandparents. This immigrant mindset of sustenance has always been ingrained in me—that crafting and artmaking should be a tool to fix, heal, or make something better. That connection to working with your hands and to the past has always stayed with me; the past and my ancestors have always been a really grounding tool in my work. 

What do you hope people will take away from your art? 

Visibility is a force and a weapon, and I’m really starting to see the importance of it now. The number of young SWANA artists that I work with that have so much agency from the get-go to create space for their own stories is incredible. 

I belong to a generation of creatives that didn’t have this access to creating and healing; art was for devil worshippers in mine and many other households. Art wasn’t a real thing in my mind and many other households. The way South Asian and SWANA artists are practising now is such a breakthrough and a marker of our hard work from the past 20 years. 

I hope with the work I am creating, the messages of faith, nationality, and the erasure of our histories is understood as an important conversation in the deconstruction of this messed up world we live in. It’s the rage, anger, and the powerlessness we feel that ignites the work I create. We are intrinsic to understanding how we got here!

Do you pull any inspiration from local culture in the SWANA region? How does it feed your work?

I’m really interested in our history—our ancient pre-Islamic histories. I’ve been fascinated by the folk tales from the bazaars and villages; so many stories I’ve come across resonate with old Scottish and British folklore. There is something really comforting about knowing there’s a connection between where you come from and where you are now. How could there be such a similar imagination between such different groups of people? It’s a comforting thought, especially in a time where it’s hard to feel a bodily or mindful connection to either right now. 

What is it you’d eventually like to achieve most?

In recent years, I’ve found more joy in seeing others create collaboratively and being a facilitator and helping see those visions through. I’ve been practising as a set designer alongside my practise as a photographer/filmmaker and I am just so in love with the diversity it brings to mine and others lives. At its core it’s a collaborative practice which depends on the passion of a group of people to materialise an idea. Bringing groups of people together, being able to share experiences and stories and making that manifest through props, costumes, festivals, music, performance…It’s like some kind of mass exercise in archiving gender non-conforming and brown people’s stories in a way that we haven’t before. 

I’m all about scaling projects right now and involving as many people as possible. The singular vision of the artist is such a patriarchal ideology anyway. I’m not sure what the end goals are but I love my community and I love opera!

So what’s next for you? 

I’ve been exploring and unpacking a lot of this summer’s experiences in a personal project with Google x Creator Labs. It’s exploring the secrets, British nationalism, the exploitation of marginalised people and their archaeology. I’m really in these feelings of sadness, anger, rage, terror, and the glamour of it all.