GOULED ABDISHAKOUR AHMED




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Praise To The Godlands (2024-Ongoing)





This Year I Vow To Make A Monument of This Body

Year of completion: 2024

Medium: Mixed-media textile art 

Size: 236cm x 396cm

Additional information: Exhibition view from Encounters, Black Rock Senegal group show at Centre Culturel Blaise Senghor, Dakar, Senegal, for the OFF of the 15th Dak’art Biennale 2024, curated by Dr Jareh Das.

Materials used: East African Macawis (sarong) in cotton, and spun silk. Embroidered canvas print self portraits & archival family photos, collected family memorabilia (maternal and paternal grandmother's buttons, doilies, broaches), embroidered found objects (rice bags). This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body is the first textile piece in my newest body of work Praise To The Godlands. The project explores psycho-memorial and pyscho-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, through sound & image. It looks at ways to honor the dead through tapestry making & collage.

In conceptualizing this piece, I was drawn to the mnemonic qualities of textiles particularly the relationship they’re able to tease between loss & memory.  I chose the macawiis fabric for its hybridity, a textile rooted in cultural exchange, a textile rooted in the reimaginings of conventional notions of masculinity .

This piece is my first foray into a larger body of work/ a new world I hope to create & inhabit, the creation of an origin story through cloth. In it I am interested in the ways in which we account for the omission of bodies & histories deemed peripheral; irredeemable. I am interested in studying the silences that exist in language, what they represent what is being omitted, what is unsayable?



“We have little time to please the living. We have an eternity to love the dead.”
-Sophocles Antigone





                                                                          Installation views This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024






                                                                          Details from This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024)



“What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in our push towards our death?”
-Christina Sharpe





Self portraits from This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024)









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