Ibrahim Ahmed - where two oceans meet - bayt, 2022-25

In this work, the artist re-enacts his father’s postures from archival images used in quickly but carefully cross to the other side, (2020), photographing each pose from four directions—front, back, left, and right—approaching photography as a sculptural form that can be encountered from multiple viewpoints. Engaging with the colonial history of photography in Africa, the work attempts to collapse these histories through the body, using studio photography to negotiate absence as a form of presence. By removing clear markers of identity and leaving only gestures of hands and feet, the body becomes an embodied archive, carrying memory, history, and inherited structures of power. The work reflects on visibility, access, and the gaze, creating images that resist full access and instead exist between political and spiritual space, fragmentation and structure.

“The Arabic word bayt means both a house and a poem. Each poem is a home, and each home is a poem. In the collapse of these histories embedded in the body and in photography, a new structure begins to emerge—one built from fragments, gestures, memory, and the possibility of reimagining the image and the body together.” - Ibrahim Ahmed