Artist Osman Yousefzada begins countdown to Bradford, UK City of Culture 2025

“This is not a complaint, but a collective memory,” says British-Pakistani artist Osman Yousefzada, looking at his work at Cartwright Hall in Bradford.

His personal exhibition, Where it startedoffers a deeply personal approach to questions of migration and memory, while engaging with universally relevant themes of work, community and identity.

The show – which features textiles, video and sculpture and sees Yousefzada temporarily wrap various artworks, including a bust of Queen Victoria – is the launch event in the countdown to Bradford becoming UK City of Culture 2025.

Although Where it started is an iteration of Yousefzada’s recent solo exhibition at the V&A, What is seen and what is notthe exhibition includes commissions created specifically for the city – including an outdoor work to be enjoyed by anyone passing through or relaxing in the very popular Lister Park, which surrounds Cartwright Hall.

This temporary public sculpture (the artist’s first large-scale outdoor work), created in collaboration with Bradford-based creative construction company SETSTAGE, envelops the almost iconic statue of Diana the Huntress outside Cartwright Hall.

Yousefzada has his own connection to Bradford – his father arrived in the city during the Commonwealth migration wave of the 1960s.

“His story resonates with the communities that surround this location, those communities that came to Bradford to work in the very mills that gave Bradford its wealth, heritage and history,” says Shanaz Gulzar, creative director for Bradford UK City of Culture 2025. , referring to Bradford’s former status as the wool capital of the world and the communities (often immigrants) that worked to make it so.

Euronews Culture caught up with Yousefzada to talk about the show, ahead of what Gulzar promises will be an “unexpected” program of events at Bradford UK City of Culture 2025 – as befits a city that is, itself, unexpected , she says.

Can you tell me a little about the title of the exhibition? Where it started?

The title is really about where our shared histories begin. You swing into a space like this – a gallery – and you don’t necessarily feel like you belong here. I really wanted to look back and see where our histories overlapped, where they tangled. I wanted to surface the conversation about our histories, particularly textiles and their connection to trade and colonialism. The fine objects such as chintz that we see in the show and that informed the practice of William Morris, for example, were a cornerstone of the Victorian sensibility – but their trade was ultimately a kind of colonial expansion.

Have migration and displacement always been topics of particular interest to you?

Yes, I have always been very interested and they are a key element of my practice. It’s this idea of ​​searching for belonging. There’s always hostile language associated with migration, and I think there’s this idea of ​​finding a space to belong, as opposed to the hostile language of those who feel you don’t have a right to be here. With displacement comes narratives, stories that get lost – mostly first generation immigrant women like the mother whose stories are lost. What I’m trying to do is bring those stories back to the surface and the overlooked stories of the working class that aren’t necessarily being told.

Do you have a personal link to Bradford?

My father first arrived here in Bradford and eventually moved to Birmingham where he put down roots, but Bradford was his first port of call. I came here in the summer because I had cousins ​​here – some went to the Canary Islands, I came to Bradford.

Why do you think it’s important for a show like this – which deals with the themes it has – to be part of the countdown to Bradford, UK, City of Culture 2025?

I am very honored to do such a show. I think this story is really about those communities and those journeys—like the one my father took and the friends and distant relatives who came before—that weren’t really a narrative in contemporary art practice. There’s always been this idea that it’s social history, but I think their traditions and ways of being are actually a very important kind of cultural production and important working-class voices.

One of the texts I wrote on the wall here asks “Did it start when bodies didn’t need languages?” (spelling error intentional) – referring to the cheap labor that gave Britain, and Bradford in particular, an efficient advantage. But once the work is done and you’re no longer needed, you’re pretty much fired. It’s an important conversation to have and it’s amazing to be one of the preludes to Bradford City of Culture.

How did you go about creating the site-specific works?

For me, doing site specific work is the key. I ask: how does the site respond? How sensitive is it? What kind of conversations are we trying to have? The context is important: Bradford, from the 1960s onwards, received cheap labor from the Commonwealth and so remained competitive as wool production was increasing in other parts of the world.

Ideas of power and class permeate the entire space – it is a very large edifice. This building is very masculine, but there is a statue of Diana the Huntress (the Roman goddess of wild animals and hunting) outside that adorns this patriarchal space. The wrapping of the statue gives the idea of ​​the different layers of the conversation: colonial expansion – which was quite different in Roman times – patriarchy, class and power. Stories from the fringes, for example about gender and immigration, come to the center.

We’re talking on local election day in England and Wales – what do you think this show has to say or how it might speak to a political moment, a socio-political climate like this?

We are also very polarized in our political camps. I don’t really know how I got here. The boat in the middle of the exhibition I made a year and a half ago, but it is still relevant. The boat here echoes the calls to “Stop the Boats” we hear from our leaders – we only focus on the optics, the symbolism, but not the issue itself or the people themselves risking life and limb.

How does the exhibition relate to questions of gender and its role in relation to migration and displacement?

Gender is central to the work, and domesticity is actually where I get a lot of inspiration, from gender roles and spaces. These blur for me – in my textile work the talismans and djinn take on roles of kind of guardians, but they don’t necessarily have any gender, they have a multitude of gendered qualities.

Mum used to pack everything – food, clothes, even just in a Poundland bag. What was really interesting is that all these women came up to me and said that the works show how their mothers occupied the space, which is really beautiful. Their voices have never been brought to the surface or made part of a cultural conversation.

Also co-present with this year’s Venice Biennale. What does your show look like in Venice (Your welcome! A palace for immigrants) refers to Where it started in Bradford?

alien and Bradford may seem like an unlikely pair, but they talk to each other a lot. Both cities, to some extent, are cities of immigrants and cities of commerce. But there are also those domestic voices, those voices of the working class, and especially those female voices that don’t really get documented – that’s what the show in Venice is about.

Who do you hope the audience for Where it started may be?

I think it has a really cross-cultural audience. Placing the sculpture over, wrapping the statue of Diana in the park was really interesting. We have white working-class boys alongside immigrant women from Pakistan – first-generation women who come from a different landscape, from rural backgrounds, and then build a house here in Bradford and occupy the park with these boys. What it does is open up conversations.

Osman Yousefzada’s “Where It Began” runs at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery between May 3 and October 13, 2024.