AYAN FARAH (B. 1978)

Ayan Farah draws from her Swedish-Somali heritage to investigate identity, the diaspora and the global flow of commodities and materials. An integral part of Farah’s practice is to travel the globe to research and source materials ranging from organic pigments and dyes to mud from the Dead Sea, Swedish clay, Mexican terracotta, locally-grown indigo and marigold. With these materials she treats vintage fabrics, often sourced from nineteenth-century homes which bear the trace of their history. Her dying and bleaching processes may take months or years to complete, often exposing the materials to sunlight for long periods in the open air.
In the silk-cotton work The Magic Hour, the textile is a powerful pink hue. Farah’s labour-intensive treatments—including the application of acrylic, fabric dye, photographic emulsion, alcohol, and vinegar—lend the work a rich, subtle and poetic patina, with ghostly traces of the stretcher-bars creating the effect of an after-image.
In Sway, a swathe of sheer crepe is delicately draped across a stretcher. The gauzy material transforms the stretcher—usually the support for a painting—into a diaphanous sculptural presence, its every pleat and crease made visible.
Farah lives and works in Stockholm. Recent exhibitions have been held at institutions including New Art Centre, Salisbury; Geukens & de Vil, Antwerp; The London Open 2018, Whitechapel Gallery; and Tarble Arts Center, Illinois. Her work is in the collection of the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Estate of Germany, Munich; the HSBC Art Collection, London; the Kadist Foundation Sammlung Klein, Eberdingen-Nussdorf; and the Saatchi Collection, London.