Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1974 Birmingham, England

Died:

Biography

Artist Osman Yousefzada was born into a Sunni Muslim family in Birmingham, England in 1977. He grew up in a conservative and tightly woven Pashtun community in Balsall Heath, with a mother of Afghan heritage who worked as a seamstress and managed a dress-making business, and a father who was a carpenter from Pakistan. His mother had arrived in England as a young girl, with only a few hours' notice, while his father came in the 1960s and worked in a factory in Bradford, a city known for its South-East Asian diaspora workforce. Both parents were illiterate in English and their native languages. In 2022, Yousefzada published The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds, a coming-of-age story about growing up with immigrant parents in a patriarchal Pashtun community. The book covers themes such as strict gender division, the coexistence of multiple communities, dual racism, masculinity, and the female world. Yousefzada first enrolled in an anthropology course at SOAS University of London, followed by an art and design foundation course at Central Saint Martins (UAL), and ultimately earned an MPhil from Cambridge University. In 2024, he was in the process of pursuing a PhD at the Royal College of Art, exploring the female immigrant experience through material culture.

Yousefzada’s interdisciplinary oeuvre includes moving image, installation, text works, sculpture, fashion design, garment making, and performance, all approached with a socio-political, autobiographical, and ethnographic methodology. His work thematically emphasises storytelling, immigration, identity, belonging, femininity, in-betweenness, and his Afghan-Pakistani heritage. Much of his practice is research-based. He began his career in fashion design with his label Osman, which became recognised for blending minimalist designs with luxurious embroidery and embellishments, inspired by his South Asian heritage. His designs were worn by celebrities such as Lupita Nyong’o, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Emma Watson. In 2018, he was invited to exhibit his work at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, thus providing him with the opportunity to expand his practice by critically examining production, migration, and female agency, or the lack thereof, in fashion, while also addressing issues of domestic violence and class inequality. The exhibition, titled Being Somewhere Else, extended beyond the gallery walls and was integrated with Birmingham’s Migrant Festival, which he conceptualised.

Most of Yousefzada's pieces and exhibitions address the themes and experiences of immigration. According to Finnigan, 'his work as an artist is his attempt to understand and relay the trauma of global immigration,' (2021). For example, his 2018 work, An Immigrant’s Room of Her Own, features a bedroom scene inspired by his mother’s intimate domestic setting and everyday rituals in England, capturing the precarious nature of immigrant life, while also serving as a portrayal of both the artist and his mother. The installation includes a chest of drawers filled with earth, alluding to the Muslim custom of burying hair, along with a rope resembling hair that stretches from the head of a mannequin to a wall-mounted textile, symbolising a connection to the artist’s identity.

What Is Seen and What Is Not was the title of Yousefzaada's solo exhibition at the V&A inn London in 2022, where he presented site-specific work exploring displacement, movement, migration, and climate change. In 2023, in response to the antagonistic anti-immigration rhetoric used by politicians, such as the Conservative Home Secretary of Indian heritage, Suella Braverman, he created 5,000 billboards across the UK with the phrase ‘More Immigrants Please’ next to an Eastern rug. For the Venice Biennale in 2024, in collaboration with the V&A, he presented Welcome! A Palazzo for Immigrants at the Palazzo Franchetti. This exhibition not only subverted the Biennale’s century-long focus on national pavilions but also explored themes of unity, movement, class, migration, exclusion, climate crisis, and immigrant displacement through installations of Murano glass, handcrafted textiles, printworks, moving images, and sculpture. Despite his commitment to resisting anti-immigration sentiments, he is not very optimistic about community, as his interview for The Art Newspaper reveals: ‘I feel that people are in encampments and we don’t recognise each other, each other’s humanity. There is a lot of Islamophobia, and the far right has taken up antisemitism. I just put my head in my hands—it’s a horrible time,’ (Yousefzada quoted in Smith, 2024).

In addition to his art practice, Yousefzada is a Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at BCU Birmingham School of Art. He has held several residencies, including at the Birmingham School of Art (2020), where he worked in the Printmaking Studio. This was followed by a residency at the Royal College of Art, London (2021–23) in the Sculpture Studio, interspersed with a 2022 residency at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan. Osman Yousefzada lives and works in London, England. In the UK his works are held public collections, including the V&A.

Related books

Mathilda Della Torre, ed., Conversations from Calais: Sharing Refugee Stories (London: Welbeck Balance, 2023)
Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2022)
Osman Yousefzada et al., What Is Seen and What Is Not, exh. cat. (London: V&A, 2022)
Jia Yang and Dan Zhang, 'An Analysis of Consumers’ Emotional Needs in the Multi-wear Design', Scientific and Social Research, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2021, pp. 154-159
Jonathan Watkins and Diana Campbell Betancourt, Osman Yousefzada: Being Somewhere Else (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 2018)

Public collections

Related organisations

Birmingham School of Art (Visiting Professor )
Central Saint Martins (student)
Jesus College, University of Cambridge (Visiting Fellow )
Osman (founder)
Royal College of Art (student )
SOAS University of London (student )

Selected exhibitions

Where it Began (solo exhibition), Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, Yorkshire (2025)
Welcome! A Palazzo for Immigrants (group show), Fondazione Berengo – Palazzo Franchetti, Venice (2024)
Osman Yousefzada (solo installation), More Immigrants Please, 5000 locations across the UK (2023)
Embodiments of Memory (solo presentation for British Ceramics Biennale), The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire (2023)
New Contemporaries (group show), Camden Art Centre, London (2023)
Life is More Important Than Art (group show), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023)
Brink (group show), Royal College of Art, London (2023)
Osman Yousefzada: What Is Seen and What Is Not (solo exhibition), V&A, London (2022)
Being Somewhere Else (solo exhibition), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2018)
Design of the Year Awards (group shows), Design Museum, London (2008)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Osman Yousefzada]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Osman Yousefzada artist