Flo Brooks and Asmaa Jama with Gouled Ahmed head up Spike Island’s summer exhibition programme

Spike Island is opening its summer programme on June 10, led by two exhibitions running concurrently until September.

West Cornwall-based artist Flo Brooks is showing a new commission, Harmonycrumb, alongside which will be featured artist and poet Asmaa Jama and costume designer Gouled Ahmed’s new collaborative work, Except this time nothing returns from the ashes.

Ahead of the launch, Bristol24/7 looks at both the installations:

Flo Brooks: Harmonycrumb

As an artist, Brooks works across multiple mediums, from painting and collage to publication, installation and social practice. His paintings are rich and layered, acting as “a kind of repository for complex feeling, memory and social and political histories”.

Harmonycrumb is a new commission looking at trans and gender-nonconforming histories, through the processes of painting and assemblage – including lino flooring cutouts and handmade objects.

Flo Brooks, Hold me hold my placard (2022) – photo: courtesy of the artist

The pieces explore speculative connections between the artist’s own experience and those of historical figures, from Joan of Arc (1412-31) to ‘female husband’ Charles Hamilton (1721-46) and physician Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62).

The exhibition notes point out that Brooks’ works afford the viewer “a flexible space for the unfolding of multiple perspectives, shifting identities and evolving relationships.

“They are not historical portraits but dream-like scenarios: fragmented, mutable, incomplete.”

Flo Brooks, Still pass we for Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (2022) – photo: courtesy of the artist

Asmaa Jama and Gouled Ahmed: Except this time nothing returns from the ashes

Based in Bristol, Jama is a Somali artist, poet and filmmaker with numerous commendations for their writing and published work in magazines and journals including Poetry Review, The Good Journal, Ambit, Ballast and Magma.

Their wide-ranging and experimental film work has included previous commissions Before We Disappear (2021) and The Season of Burning Things (2021), both of which were made with Ahmed, as part of a longstanding creative collaboration.

Ahmed is an artist, stylist, costume designer and writer, artistically preoccupied with memory, belonging and futurity, and finding ways to confront traumatic histories and challenge power structures in the Horn of Africa.

Asmaa Jama and Gouled Ahmed, Except this time nothing returns from the ashes (2023) – photo: courtesy of the artists

Arising from their respective family photo archives, this new work from Jama and Ahmed centres around a film shot on location in Addis Ababa, following the ghostly, glitchy presence of those who are marginalised within the city.

Through spoken word, music, and an enigmatic poetic narrative, the piece explores the construction, and corruption, of historical, political, national and personal identity: “Self-portraiture becomes an act of resisting erasure, demonstrating the potential of photography and the archive to remember”.

Asmaa Jama and Gouled Ahmed, Except this time nothing returns from the ashes (2023) – photo: courtesy of the artists

The two concurrent exhibitions, Flo Brooks: Harmonycrumb, and Asmaa Jama with Gouled Ahmed: Except this time nothing returns from the ashes, are at Spike Island from June 10-September 10, Wednesday-Sunday 12-5pm (closed Monday and Tuesday). More information on the programme is available from www.spikeisland.org.uk. Gallery entry is free and you do not need to book.

Main photo: Flo Brooks

Read more: Spike Island to open three exhibitions in February

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