Join us for this free in-conversation with Aisha Ajnabi (Umulkhayr Mohamed) & Rupali Leela Naik that carries on an exchange around the works in Histories, Legacies & Futures, at Oriel y Bont as part of Ffoto Cymru 2024.

This event will explore how their body of work began, the process and development, as well as a broader approach to photography and how this body of work continues to develop.

**

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.

Rupali Leela Naik is an artist, historian, and practicing healer. Growing up as a second-generation immigrant with a working-class background, Rupali has often focused on unpicking the world around them. Learning from theoretical and lived experience, her time at Exeter University taught her a great deal about colonial history and its legacy. Applying ontological design - the way we design our existence - she applied all she had learnt into her dissertation titled, ‘In Pluriversal Harmony: Visualising Ways of Being in the Diaspora’, which won an award and was further nominated at the Association for Art History. Though, due to circumstance and enjoyment, she is currently working as a massage therapist and understanding the impact these legacies can have on the body and mind.