Osman Yousefzada’s latest exhibition interrogates colonial legacies

Osman Yousefzada, an artist and writer, challenges entrenched narratives of colonialism, migration, and disparity through his evocative and interdisciplinary practice. Born in Birmingham, a city in the United Kingdom with a high immigrant population, and tracing his roots to the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), he adopts a deeply personal and auto-ethnographic approach in his practice. His work reflects on his experiences as the child of immigrants, particularly from the Bame (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) community.

His questioning of the social and economic inequities that shape our world today is encapsulated within the many layers of his oeuvre. His past career as a fashion designer-creating garments for Beyoncé, Lupita Nyong'o, and Kristen Stewart introduced him to textiles as an expressive medium. His practice shifted over time to textile and object-based works that examined more complex histories of migration, exploitation, and identity.

Yousefzada's deep connection to textiles comes from his early exposure to his mother's dressmaking business. This grounding in textile traditions became the bedrock of his artistic language. To Yousefzada, textiles are not just aesthetic or functional but carriers of memory, history, and identity. In his current exhibition, textiles become symbolic of migration and labour, intertwined with personal narratives of struggle and resilience. It's precisely this interplay between personal and political, a constant in his work, which he uses to weave together personal experience and invite the viewer to understand the continued implications of colonialism on global power structures.

A research practitioner at the Royal College of Art, London and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, Yousefzada is a prolific artist who has had his series of solo presentations at significant institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Fondazione Berengo at the Venice Biennale, and Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford.

His latest intervention ‘When Will We Be Good Enough?’ is a bold, and ambitious experiment at The Box in Plymouth. Yousefzada combines objects from the museum's collection at The Box to recontextualise institutional histories. Intervening with the historical storytelling, he re-examines Britain's colonial legacy and its continued impact on contemporary diasporic lives. A central installation of the exhibition includes three small black-painted boats, each carrying symbolic cargo: tinned mangoes, a ceramic poppy head, and a cabinet filled with flora from Africa, Australia, and South Asia. The boats are symbolic of colonial extraction, laden with goods once traded under exploitative terms. The black paint, which Yousefzada describes as “the black of colonial extraction”, is a visual indicator of exploitation, binding these objects to centuries of violent migration and economic extraction.

Plymouth, with its historical association to British imperial voyages, amplifies such potent symbols. As Victoria Pomery, CEO of The Box, says, “Working with artists in this way enables us to ask questions and tell stories in new and different ways — something which is vital given Plymouth’s complex history.” The cargo of the boats—simple in form yet rich in history—serves as a metaphor for the intertwined legacies of colonialism and the ongoing struggles faced by diasporic communities. However, the symbolism, while evocative, often feels fragmented, as the interplay between the various objects generates a narrative tension that can verge on ambiguity. While the work raises vital issues, its critical framework occasionally feels diffuse, relying heavily on the audience to navigate and synthesise the multiplicity of meanings independently, particularly in this exhibition, where supporting literature is absent.

One of the elements in the exhibition was a carpet laid out at the centre of the gallery, flanked by plaster busts of modern-day tech giants such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Yousefzada refers to them as the “chief extractors” of the digital present. By aligning them with the colonial elite of the past, such as Lord Byron—whose bust is also included in the installation—a connection is drawn between the old and new elites, framing a direct critique of the persistence of exploitative systems, from imperialism to modern-day capitalism. “By combining new works by Yousefzada with rarely displayed objects from The Box’s rich collections, it showcases an artist who is at the forefront of contemporary practice and invites audiences to engage in critical conversations about shared histories and global dynamics,” added Pomery.

The juxtaposition of these figures with busts of historical colonial figures is provocative, drawing attention to the power structures that transcend time. However, while this comparison is compelling, they risk simplifying the complexities of global power into easily identifiable figures. The installation works as a critique of contemporary capitalism and it could push further into fully interrogating the systems that underpin these figures’ power.

In this process of navigation between his own, complex lived reality, imposed and self-imposed marginality also feature in the work of Yousefzada. His own biography serves as a foundation here: the child of immigrants carving out a place within Britain—often inhospitable—but reimagined as a space where marginality becomes a form of resistance rather than mere exclusion. Thus, physically sited in gallery spaces literally at its margin are an array of objects and figures on the threshold—the penumbral—the potential places for agency, metamorphosis, transformation, even liberation.

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