“They queer the space, queer the archive. They remain on the margins. They are present but not part of the end of game. They are a frieze, a constellation of dark bodies in blue waters, tied up, helping each other, exoticised and peering out.”
Osman Yousefzada, 2026
The home is a universal concept that most people have experienced and understand. It is often seen as a place that provides a comfortable, safe, and stable environment for both children and adults. It can also serve as a refuge and a centre for domestic activities, memories, and personal identity. However, a home can also be deceptive, and in extreme circumstances, terrible events may occur behind closed doors.Osman Yousefzada latest body of work is exploring in subtle manner what a home constitutes. To him, a home is surrounded with spoken and unspoken dichotomies.
Developed between 2025 and 2026, this new body of work examines domestic space as a site of presence, intimacy and transformation. Working across multiple processes, the works extend and deepen the artist’s visual language, bringing together painting, textile, collage and mark-making to construct environments that are at once materially layered and psychologically charged.
For Yousefzada, the home is never neutral. It is shaped by migration, silence, protection and control. Drawing on the figure of the jinn, understood within Islamic and South Asian cosmologies as beings that exist alongside the human world, he approaches the domestic interior as a space charged with unseen presence. Not metaphor, but atmosphere. Not fantasy, but inheritance.
Working across oil and acrylic pigment, fibre, collage, screen printing and embroidery, Yousefzada builds surfaces that feel constructed and unsettled at once. Textile and paint operate together. Pattern interrupts and conceals. Architecture bends into something closer to skin. His materials carry autobiography without illustration, allowing personal and collective histories to sit within the work without being resolved.
The paintings move between figuration and abstraction. Bodies fragment. Interiors press inward. Thresholds feel unstable. The domestic space becomes both refuge and restriction, a place where love, discipline, spirituality and imagination coexist.
A Home that will not Behave positions the home not as backdrop but as structure. A structure that shapes the body and is shaped by it. A space that holds contradiction. A space that refuses to be tidied into a single narrative.
Osman Yousefzada is a British born interdisciplinary artist and writer of Pakistani heritage whose practice spans textile, sculpture, installation, moving image, garment making and performance. Grounded in storytelling, his work draws on autobiography, fiction and ritual to explore migration, displacement and the ways bodies carry history, memory and transformation.
His work has been presented internationally at institutions including Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Ikon Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Design Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, the Lahore Biennale and the Alongside his artistic practice, Yousefzada is a research practitioner at the Royal College of Art and a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge. His memoir The Go Between (2022) won the Slightly Foxed Prize and was described by Stephen Fry as one of the most significant childhood memoirs of its time.
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Courtesy and ©Osman Yousefzada, Bolanle Contemporary and Renée Pfister Art & Gallery Consultancy 2025.