Asmaa Jama

Lives and works in Bristol, UK

Artist statement

I work across text, painting, moving image and performance, with my practice deeply preoccupied with the image and texture of burning. Drawing from Islamic cosmology, I explore jinn and other beings made of fire as metaphors for spectres, ghostliness, and the crossing of realms—concepts that allow them to reckon with migration, loss, and the complexities of diaspora. My work is equally concerned with reworking myths, particularly those rooted in East African tales, examining what myth and ritual reveal about the human condition: our beliefs, fears, and the stories we create to ensure our survival. Through this exploration of fire, spectres, and ancestral narratives, I create a body of work that navigates transience and the liminal spaces between worlds. My film work is concerned with re-working myths, tales and submerged histories. I use archival sources, in places inventing in the spaces where there are silences, using speculative tales, monsters, tales from the margins and the discarded. My work, The Blood Coast, explores the history of two extractive intersecting trades along the Indian Ocean, pearl diving and the Afro-Arab slave trade. It particularly draws on the visual and sonic worlds of the divers, and the image of the ocean eating away at their bodies. And the Pearl itself layers of nacre, formed around a wound. In this piece they are transformed into sirens, and return to haunt these landscapes. The piece also touches on the British involvement in these trades...

Artwork