Aisha Ajnabi & Melissa Rodrigues
I just want to love you (in my own language) © Aisha Ajnabi (Umulkhayr Mohamed, the Ancestors, and Kieran Cudlip)
Selected as part of the Ffoto Cymru International Open Call, Histories, Legacies & Futures brings together the work of Melissa Rodrigues and Aisha Ajnabi.
Rodrigues’ portraits draw inspiration from the photography of Seydou Keïta and African hairstyles. Each portrait reflects the beauty, complexity, tradition, and historical significance of these hairstyles, representing a journey through African heritage and the diaspora.
The portraits incorporate wax print fabric (produced in the Netherlands and widely worn in West Africa) and ‘panu di pinti’, a traditional textile from Guinea-Bissau, emphasising African cultural heritage. The works also highlight traditional African hairstyles, such as the Amasunzu from Rwanda, historically worn to signify social status, and the Afro, which became a symbol of resistance during the American Civil Rights Movement.
Aisha Ajnabi’s multi-medium series, (Officer am I) too far gone?, documents a performance which involved walking the length of Newport Road in Cardiff, from 5:30pm, re-enacting a historical event where a Somali seaman was once told by a police officer in the 1920s that he could not do the same.
The performance was a ritualistic reclamation of space, in response to the racialised policing of Black migrant dock workers in Cardiff. The photographic works in this series seek to make the presence of ancestors visible, featuring multiple glowing depictions of Ajnabi within each image, symbolising their presence. Their works in this exhibition empahsises the legacies of colonial policing in the UK whilst honoring the ancestors who anchor the series.
Opening Hours
Monday - Friday, 10am - 5pm
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Umulkhayr Mohamed is a Welsh Somali artist, writer, curator, and educator who produces work under the name, Aisha Ajnabi. Aisha Ajnabi is an imagined entity created by Umulkhayr and is conceptualised as their ‘art other’, their is this case meaning that the convening of Umulkhayr, the ancestors, and their collobrators, both the human and more-than-human. Her artistic practice involves primarily sound, photographic and video installations, and performance work that explores the tension present between enjoying the act of wandering between emancipatory temporalities and a functional need to position oneself in the now. His art is the place where they are able to join the practicing of a spirituality rooted in animism and ancestral honouring with a politic grounded in solidarity and liberation. She sees their practice as doing the work of eroding the borders between beings to reveal the wholeness that lies beneath.