Gouled Abdishakour Ahmed: Reimagining Africa’s future through radical art

Gouled Abdishakour Ahmed is a Somali visual artist, costume designer, and director using art to challenge entrenched colonial narratives that have long shaped perceptions of the ‘other’ in Africa. The artist’s work delves into the labyrinthine legacies of power, offering a comprehensive lens through which to examine identity, gender, and the societal constructs that dictate them. Born in Djibouti and currently based in Ethiopia, their practice centres on radical imagination and the pursuit of equitable world-building using various mediums, seeking to scrutinise and peel back arbitrary designations throughout history.

Much of Gouled’s practice is rooted in their occupation with the concept of ‘ugliness;’ what it entails and who dictates it. “I have always been fascinated by the bizarre, the uncanny, the strange, things in diametric opposition to hegemonic beauty standards,” they explain. Their work is grounded in analysing the veneers of aestheticism, particularly in their home continent: “It is the sartorial boldness I see daily, the Somali elders with their kufis and orange henna bears, the women adorned in their gold. It is witnessing the daily commitment to beauty as ritual, beauty as repetition.” 

It’s this idea around the dressing of the self and the perceptions that arise from it that prompted Gouled into the world of visual art, filmmaking, and costume design. They grapple with what they call the “liberatory possibilities” that extend from fashion as a transformative power. “What inspires me is the theatrics of textile, the crafting and performing of identities through props, jewellery, and performance,” Gouled affirms. They use clothes and photography to shirk the limiting prism of prejudice often cast onto ‘othered bodies. “Societies’ imaginary borders are largely founded on hierarchies of value rooted in very negative readings of difference. I use clothes and the camera as tools to resist society’s limited and thereby often limiting expectations of me, and in this way it’s as though the body becomes a site of protest.”

Their work tackles the varied forms of erasure existing in the Horn of Africa, looking particularly into the materiality of dispossession and what it means to exist outside of hegemonic social boundaries (or “imaginaries”). “I try to reimagine a world where the ruin is not an afterthought, an aftermath, a byproduct (of violence/of time and its erasures); by looking at and engaging with critical essayist Sadiyah Hartman’s concept of ‘Critical fabulation,’” Gouled expounds. “How we can write new worlds into existence, explore alternate timelines, restitch the fabrics that bind our world.” The artist imbues East African folklore and oral history traditions in their self-portraiture, tapestry work, and film, exploring “the continuity and the rupture” present within them. “My work is an intervention. It is a study of the archive and its erosions, It looks at the after effects, the decay. The ways in which we are able to simulate remembering, the ways in which we are misremembered.”

Gouled’s accolades are as impressive as their vision. They’ve received a host of notable honours, including the African Cultural Fund’s inaugural grant in 2019, the Prince Claus Fund’s Seed Award in 2021, and the Sharjah Art Foudnation’s Production Programme Grant in 2022. Their film ‘The Season of Burning Things,’ a collaborative project with poet and filmmaker Asmaa Jama, was awarded at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Black Star Film festival. But it’s their self-portrait series in V&A’s Africa Fashion exhibition in 2022 that they take the most pride in, having toured the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and as a display at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, from which it will continue to tour until 2026. “As a self-taught artist from the Horn of Africa, it often felt like I was creating my self-portrait work in a silo, so for my work to be recognised and included alongside artists, and designers I’ve long looked up to, was a heartening moment for me,” Gouled professes.

In the last year, Gouled has traded their lens-based art for textile work, culminating in their project entitled ‘Praise to the Godlands.’ It’s a series of mixed-media works featuring the macawis (sarong) textile, a fabric initially produced in Indonesia before proliferating across South Asia, SWANA, and East Africa. “‘Praise To The Godlands’ explores psycho-memorial and psycho-spatial terrains It investigates the choreographic registers of dispossession, elegiac forms of ritual making, mourning, and navigating geographies of loss. It looks at how we are able to map the histories of our dead through world building, myth making, sound, and image. It looks at ways to honour the dead through tapestry-making and collage.” 

Most pertinent, Gouled is seeking to dismantle the illusive fallacy of Western centrism, and to invest in the flourishing creative scene of the global south. “I hope to see the global majority reclaim its place as central and not peripheral,” Gouled delineates. “I hope to see more governmental support for the arts and the cultural sector across the region to allow young creatives the space and time to experiment in their making processes. I hope to see more cross-cultural collaboration. I hope to see new visual, sonic, literary, architectural languages being formed collectively.”