AMA ESSEL
“You are the star, fancy and afar” (2023) was created as part of Perceive sea, dunes, mountains in move -group exhibition curated by Nimco Kulmiye Hussein and Neicia Marsh.
Perceive sea, dunes, mountains in move, is a group exhibition featuring the works of seven artists who work across installation, sculpture, sound and film.
In Diasporic Landscapes of Longing (from “Art on My Mind: Visual Politics”), bell hooks explores the visual politics of art and aesthetics through the work of artist and photographer Carrie Mae Weems. bell hooks returns to the experience and subjectivity as a realm of radical site of remembrance, guiding the reader on how the subjective knowledge and lived experiences that form within the spaces that surround us, are often reflected, engaged and confronted in the practices of artists of colour.
Similar to the explorations that bell hooks touches on, the works of Ama Essel, Sasha Huber, Ima Iduozee, Liisa-Irmelen Liwata, Mikki Noroila, Man Yau and Haliz Yosef traverses across diasporic experiences, narratives, emotions, place-making, commonality, and belonging. Employing various conceptual starting points and an array of materials and techniques, the group exhibition makes tangible the manners in which visual artists analyse and embody their local, national, and global identities.
The exhibition follows a rhizomatic structure that further underlines the diversity of lived experiences from the exhibiting artists. The curatorial authorship is dispersed accordingly, using practices of care and collaboration, to emphasise contributors’ and participants’ intellectual and ethical agency.
This exhibition has been generously supported by:
Frame Contemporary Art Finland
The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland
198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
Photography Dominique Croshaw