Ayan Farah RA

Focus, September 03, 2024 September 26, 2024

Ayan Farah’s works are an alchemy of substances applied on canvas, linen, hemp, and silk. She uses materials such as forest ash, clay, cloud-seeded water, indigo, mud, rust, and marigold to create dyes that are sometimes subdued in sunlight and fixed in vinegar.

The construction of her fabrics is dictated by available material and often includes off-cuts from earlier works, accumulatively stitched together into patchworks that contain the stories of their making. Farah’s practice is self-sufficient in that her works are generated from pre-sourced materials, home-grown pigments and fundamental environmental factors such as sunlight rather than automated processes or global supply chains.

Some years ago, Farah restlessly sought a more nomadic way of working in response to a sedentary life in the studio. She carried fabrics that could absorb pigments, minerals and matter from the places she visited: China, Gotland, the Dead Sea, Iceland, Mexico, and Western Sahara to name a few. She then inverted the process, taking raw materials back to her studio to be mixed and brewed for months, even years. Farah sources the fabric itself from antique textile dealers: heirlooms, from pristine household sheets to threadbare hostel bedlinens. Some fragments bare embroidered initials that hark back to a history of family lineages. Although not explicitly political, issues of power, property, trade, territory and colonial relations permeate her practice.

Born in 1978 in Sharjah, UAE, to Somali parents, Ayan Farah was raised in Sweden and studied painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Moving back to Stockholm in 2020, some of her international career highlights include the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Tarble Arts Centre in Charleston, the Klein Collection in Germany, and Galeria Casas Riegner in Bogotá. Her work is included in the collections of The Kadist Foundation, the Roberts Family Foundation, Public Art Agency Sweden, and Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, among others. Farah participated in the Black Rock Senegal 2022 Artist-in-Residence program, founded by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley. She has been featured in group exhibitions in places such as Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2024); El Espacio 23, Miami, US, and Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy (both 2023); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2022).