Lines of History - Osman Yousefzada’s Entangled Pasts

I

For Osman Yousefzada, the personal is inextricably linked to the political. Yousefzada’s father came to Britain in 1965, and his mother followed in 1974. Like generations arriving before and after them, they faced the challenge of forging a life in a country often hostile to their presence. The precarious circumstances frequently experienced by immigrants, racially demonised and caught up in unstable and exploitative employment, cannot be separated from the history of Western attempts to assert mastery over the rest of the world dating back to the 15th century. Immigrants, as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall observed, are “doubly inscribed. They remain tied, if only in memory, to the places and cultures of origin, which are themselves deeply enmeshed in the systems of global power…. And they are recruited into subaltern positions in the division of labour and cultures of belongingness in the metropolitan spaces.”

II

A visitor to Yousefzada’s installation When will we be good enough? in St Luke’s is greeted with a patterned carpet that lies in the centre of the gallery floor. At the edges of the carpet he has placed plaster cast busts of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, “the chief extractors” of a new era of digitally enabled exploitation. With a glint of mordant humour, he has dressed them in classical robes - Musk wears a Roman breastplate of particularly disquieting design - to underscore their status as “our new overlords”, the imperial rulers of an absurdly iniquitous economic system.

Around the walls of St Luke’s, Yousefzada has also situated busts of Victorian grandees and gentlewomen from The Box collection. The two sets of figures suggest a connection between the elites of past and present. But they also point to the ways that the ties of colonial rule and private enterprise established in previous eras by organisations like the East India Company continue to echo in today’s information age.

For example, the first underwater telegraph cable linking England and India was laid in 1870. Stretching from Porthcurno, Cornwall, to Mumbai, the advent of the telegraph enabled London to assert control on even the remotest of the colonies through the new communications technology. Today, underwater cables transmit digital information to link the modern world, the majority of which are owned or leased by the likes of Meta, Amazon and Google. But as Yousefzada highlights, the cable routes, then and now, run along the same seafaring channels used by merchant vessels and slave ships in the colonial period. “It’s the continuous crime of capitalism, from slavery and colonialism to the concentration of power and extracted wealth in the global north today. New power is built on existing power. Colonialism doesn’t die - it rebuilds itself.”

The presence of this patterned carpet is consistent with Yousefzada’s interest in the emotional and psychological resonance of domestic spaces. In previous works, such as those featured in the V&A exhibition, What Is Seen and What Is Not, 2022, the artist has displayed a set of small, sculpted forms in black ceramic and glass on a similar carpet. The items recall the household objects that his mother, having emigrated from Pakistan to Balsall Heath in Birmingham, would wrap in fabric or in plastic “as an act of agency in patriarchal spaces… an altar to female migratory experience.”

In this instance, Yousefzada has conjured the carpet as a site of memory and mourning. Its surface is populated with an array of everyday metal objects that spin and emit sound, forming a “domestic orchestra playing in sonic lament” to exploited labour and to lives lost to a hostile environment. Between 1976 and 1981, for example, 36 Black and Asian people in Britain died in racially motivated murders, including an Asian woman and her three children in Walthamstow, who were killed in an arson attack on their house and an elderly Asian woman in Leamington Spa who died when racists doused her in petrol and set fire to her sari.

III

The gallery space in St Luke’s is occupied by a cornucopia of objects including three small boats. Each vessel carries a different cargo - a stack of tinned mangoes; a ceramic poppy head; an open cabinet bearing plants from Africa, Australia and South Asia. The boats are painted black, “the black of colonial extraction,” as Yousefzada puts it, and their cargoes tell individual, yet interlinked, stories of a modern world defined by inequality and subjugation.

For example, the stacked tins of Alphonso mangoes in one of the boats derive their name from Afonso de Albuquerque, a 15th century Portuguese military leader and architect of that country’s empire in India. Their naming illustrates how the spread of mangoes around the world from Portuguese colonies in Goa in the 16th century, was inextricably linked to Portugal’s establishment of new territories in West Africa and the Americas.

As signalled by the cargo in another boat, scores of cuttings and seedlings were brought to Britain in the 18th century, as part of a colonial quest for knowledge and economic power. For Portugal and Britain and other expansionist European powers during the age of empire, the movement and transfer of plants and the products derived from them, such as quinine and rubber, went hand in hand with the transportation of people to provide a colonial labour force, through slavery and indentured servitude. In pursuit of advantage in a growing competitive global market, for instance, the East India Company trafficked tens of thousands of enslaved people from Africa to work on plantations in India and Indonesia in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The ceramic poppy head in a third boat gestures to the company’s decision, following the decline of the cotton trade in the early 19th century, to turn to the mass cultivation and export of opium to China, with all the political instability and human suffering that followed as an outcome.

IV

Ultimately, Yousefzada’s installation poses a question. If the assembled works in When will we be good enough? present a picture of an entangled world caught up in the historical threads of power, race and extractivism, how do you/we step beyond those constraints? How do we reach freedom?

Appropriately enough, Yousefzada proposes an answer from the physical fringes of the exhibition. Situated around the walls of St Luke’s are a series of painted tapestries depicting silhouetted male figures, hand sewn in suede on blue canvas. The works are an extension of Yousefzada’s Queer Feet series, first shown in a 2023 exhibition at Charleston, the modernist home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a gathering point for the writers and thinkers of the Bloomsbury group. The figures are culled from the 1950’s soft porn and male athletic body building magazines that Grant used for his own erotic drawings.

At Charleston Yousefzada imagined them as working-class queer bodies of colour making a place for themselves in a domestic space of privilege. On the walls of The Box by contrast, they stand as both witnesses to the long history of colonial extractivism, and an indication of the possibility of living otherwise, in intimacy and empathy and togetherness, in contradiction to the dehumanising strictures of the capitalist system. As Yousefzada puts it, “They queer the space, queer the archive. They remain on the margins. They are present but not part of the end of game. They are a frieze, a constellation of dark bodies in blue waters, tied up, helping each other, exoticised and peering out.”

In this way, Yousefzada signals a distinction between the experience of marginalisation, as imposed by oppressive structures of power, and the sense of marginality you might choose as an act of resistance. His artworks are a reminder that although the place of the margins might be a subaltern one, it is also the space from which we can be free to shape our own terms of engagement with a hostile world. It is the space, as the scholar Bell Hooks wrote, “which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.”

With When will we be good enough? Yousefzada opens new territory in the discourse on colonialism and its afterlife. He offers a vision of a concatenated present, where power and capital and the urge to extract and dominate continue to operate along the same trade routes as in previous eras, and with the same destructive force. And he extends an invitation to visitors to plot their way through the complex lines of history and find their way to the human, in its equal, but affirming complexity. As conjured by a frieze of queer bodies gathered in kinship. Or an orchestra of objects spinning and sounding in testament to immigrant stories of fortitude or sorrow, abundance or possibility. Stories yet to be heard in their richness and their delicate beauty.

Footnotes

Para 1: Hall, Stuart "Creolization, Diaspora, and Hybridity in the Context of Globalization.” In Créolité and Creolization, ed. OkwuiEnwezor et al., Hatje Cantze, 2002, 195.
Para 2: Quotes from Yousefzada originate from a dialogue between the author and artist on 3 October 2024
Para 5: Ibib. 4 | See Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, Pluto Press, 2010
Para 6: Yousefzada, Osman, What is Seen & What is Not, V&A, 2022, 9
Para 11: Hooks, Bell, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990. 145-53