Commissioned by Spike Island, Except this time nothing returns from the ashes by Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed is a moving image project exploring self-portraiture, archiving and memory. The film follows ghostly, glitchy presences haunting a city, each figure representing those who exist in the margins or the periphery. The poetic narrative of the film asks: Who is remembered and why? Who is erased from the narratives of the nation? Through these questions, we examine the ways canons are built and can be corrupted.
Myriade is a rich and uplifting explosion of music, film and performance — a curatorial platform in which Dorothée Munyaneza convenes a myriad of voices, gestures, rhythms and stories to resonate at Short Theatre 2026. Munyaneza has invited artists who share her search for poetry and who incessantly invent other ways of inhabiting the world, for a programme that includes a screening, a concert and a performance.
Alongside Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed, Myriade will also be activated by a concert from Gildaa and the show Toi, Moi, Tituba… by Dorothée Munyaneza herself.
Asmaa Jama is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker. Asmaa Jama works across text, painting, moving image and performance, with their practice deeply preoccupied with the image and texture of burning. Drawing from Islamic cosmology, they 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. Their 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, Jama creates a body of work that navigates transience and the liminal spaces between worlds. Asmaa was the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (2024) and was commended for the Brunel African Poetry Prize (2022). Asmaa was also the winner of the Art X Lagos prize (2023), and has undertaken residencies in Berlin, Alexandria, Marseille and Athens. They were also a resident artist at Somerset House Studios. Their exhibition Except this time nothing returns from the ashes toured at Spike Island, Bristol and Africa Centre, New York. And they exhibited at New Contemporaries (2024-2025). They are currently a resident at Pervasive Media Studio and a studioholder at Spike Island. They are exhibiting at the inaugural National Somalia Pavillion at the 61st La Biennale di Venezia.
Gouled Abdishakour Ahmed is an artist, stylist, costume designer and writer. Their work explores themes of memory, belonging and futurity using self-portraiture and self-fashioning as a tool to challenge traumatic histories and interrogate how structures of power have created meaning in how the ‘other’ is seen and understood in the Horn of Africa. They collaborated with Asmaa Jama on Before We Disappear, an interactive moving image piece commissioned by BBC Arts, and The Season of Burning Things, an experimental film commissioned by Bristol Old Vic (2021). Abdishakour Ahmed features in the documentary The Ones Who Keep Walking, commissioned by Johnnie Walker, and their work has been shown widely at venues such as V&A Museum, London (2022); Alliance Ethio-Francaise, Addis Ababa (2021); Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2021); Northstar Church of the Arts, Durham (2019); ZOMA Museum, Addis Ababa (2018); Guramayle Art Center, Addis Ababa (2018); Asni Art Gallery, Addis Ababa (2018); Lela Art Gallery, Addis Ababa (2018); and Africa Center, London (2017). Ahmed graduated with a degree in History from Bard College, New York (2015) and received the Prince Claud Fund’s Seed Awards (2022) and the African Cultural Fund’s Visual Arts Grant, Bamako, Mali (2020). Ahmed, is also an artist-in-residence, at Black Rock Senegal (2022).
artistic direction Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed
Myriade #1: Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed Myriade #1: Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed
ph. Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed