THE ANATOMY OF A MOUNTAIN

Gouled Abdishakour Ahmed (b.1992) is an Addis Ababa–based Djiboutian visual artist, writer, costume designer, and filmmaker. Their work explores the themes of memory and belonging, identity and embodiment through the lens of self-portrait photography, film, costume design, and textile art.

We met Ahmed face to face in London after being connected online through a mutual friend based in Sweden for years — a union that took place in its own time and space organically. We shared stories around art, international living and the paradigms that surround those circumstances, along with a mutual admiration for visual mediums and photography practices, particularly the importance of self-portraiture and documenting one’s time here on earth.

Currently in residence at the Delfina Foundation in London, Ahmed shares with us a selection of self-portraits and visual imagery from two bodies of work. The first explores Ahmed’s extensive textile practice and the remembrance of the dead. Coming from cultures that are deeply patrilineal in their remembrances, Ahmed’s work considers alternate forms of archiving — seeking to decenter patriarchal power while centering femme modes of memory making in the Horn of Africa. Through textiles such as the Macawis (sarong), chosen for its hybridity and cultural exchange, Ahmed creates monuments for those whose names and legacies have been rendered invisible, animating the dead through acts of remembrance and care.

The second body of work, My Beauty Is The Beauty of The Other(ed) Places (2022–2023), looks at ceremonial mask making, modern shrouding applications, and anti-recognition garments as technologies of resistance. These works examine invisibility, hyper-visibility, and disappearance — using garments, masking, and shapeshifting forms as a revolt against surveillance and hegemonic othering. Drawing on folklore, counter-histories, and Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” Ahmed imagines alternate timelines where archives are re-stitched and forgotten bodies, stories, and histories are brought back into collective memory.


Photography and words about the bodies of work by: Gouled Abdishakour Ahmed
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Praise To The Godlands’
(2024-Onging)

This Year I Vow To Make A Monument Of This Body (2024) is the first textile piece from 'Praise To The Godlands' (2024-Ongoing). The project thinks through novel approaches to Islamic folklore, Somali mythology and eschatology. It explores psycho-memorial & psycho-spatial terrains and looks at elegiac forms of ritual making, mourning, and navigating geographies of loss. My work looks at how we are able to map the histories of our dead through world building, through myth making, through sound, and image. It looks at ways to honor the dead through tapestry making and assemblage.

My textile sculptures chart familial cartographies, cosmologies of belonging, of rupture & loss. I create tessellating poem maps navigating the uncharted terrain of my family tree through the modes of familial ethnographic interventions, through the collection/ digitization/use of archival photos, letters, cassette tapes, through refurbishing material heritage (textiles & jewelry) in order to make sense of the past & reimagine alternative futures. Drawing on the mnemonic and memorial potentials of textiles, my work explores cultural heritage, code-making and inherited stories. It is concerned with the themes of re-memory, edited memory and experimental bio-mythologies.

In my research I draw on the seminal works of Saidiya Hartman thinking of how to incorporate ‘critical fabulation’ into my world-making. I use Glissant’s concept of ‘archipelagic thought’ when trying to piece /stitch together / navigate the disparate stories of my ancestral past and to concurrently imagine how we might allow for multiple and sometimes contradictory memories/ histories to co-exist. I use Tina Campt's theory of 'listening to images' to explore the haptic, affective and sonic possibilities that images contain.

Coming from cultures that are deeply patrilineal in their remembrances, my work seeks to consider alternate forms of archiving, it seeks to de-center patriarchal power & center a femme and queer focused form of memory making in the Horn of Africa. I seek to remember those of us, whose names, whose legacies are forgotten, rendered invisible. I center the stories of the othered in my family to make monuments of them. My work in essence is a litany of survival & centers the unremembered & un-rememberable. It survives on repetition, it survives on assigning meaning, healing, and care by resuscitating a wounded family tree. It survives on animating my dead, assigning them the dignity they deserved in this life, the remembrance that they were never afforded. I seek to chart & explore alternate epigenetic chronologies to offer new life, new worlds for my dead. My work bridges tools of testimony, I create as a means to remember.

In a world where memories are being actively erased, where centers of remembering are being purposefully destroyed & targeted by colonizing forces, it is an especially pertinent moment to center the collective remembering of the dead. In conceptualizing 'Praise To The Godlands' I was

drawn to the mnemonic qualities of textiles particularly the relationship they're able to tease between loss & memory. I chose the Macawis (sarong) fabric particularly for its hybridity, a textile rooted in cultural exchange, a textile rooted in the reimagining of conventional notions of masculinity.

My Beauty Is The Beauty of The Other(ed) Places (2022-2023)

My Beauty Is The Beauty of The Other(ed) Places (2022-2023) looks at modern shrouding applications, ceremonial mask making, and the crafting of anti-recognition garments as technologies of resistance. I use them as tools to revolt against state-designed surveillance mechanisms. As a means to discuss the themes of invisibility, hyper-visibility, and disappearing. I think of what it means to cloak, create masks to survive, shape shift, become chimeric. My practice acts as a means to rupture legacies of hegemonic othering. It asks the questions ‘How do we tell stories of defiance? How do we archive remembrance?’

My work is concerned with the language of displacement, exile, and the poetics of silence. I am concerned with the notion of exodus and the figure of the transient. My images force those who view them to witness, to bear testimony. Language does not make room for difference. History does not mark the places, the graves the marginalized leave.

I try to reimagine a world where the ruin is not an afterthought, an aftermath, a byproduct; (of violence/ of time its erasures), by looking at and engaging with critical essayist Saidiya Hartman’s concept of 'critical fabulation'. How we can write new worlds into existence, explore alternate timelines, restitch the fabrics that bind our world. I engage with myth, as a sacred form of knowledge transmission, I engage with counter histories that are quantum and robust. I imagine East African folklore and oral history traditions through self portraiture, film, costume design and textile art, the continuity and rupture that exists 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. 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.

I am interested in understanding the themes of memorialization and monumentalization through their interplay with power, especially in how they relate to state formation, and identity formation. How they dictate who is remembered and why, who is made invisible, peripheral, ghostly and why. How archives are imbued with their own characteristics of livingness. How memories, both ancestral, collective, and personal are imbued with a sort of nonlinearity, and how we are able to archive memory and materialize it simultaneously.