Visual arts
These socio-political issues are explored through mediums of moving image, installations, text works, sculpture, garment making and performance.
Infinity Pattern 1 is Yousefzada’s first piece of public art, selected by Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery from an international shortlist. The black-pink pattern is an installation at the Selfridges Birmingham store.[17][18]
Yousefzada's first solo exhibition, "Being Somewhere Else", was at the critically acclaimed contemporary art space Ikon Gallery in 2018, curated by Jonathan Watkins. The exhibition was made to demonstrate the inequalities in the factory systems of mass production, as well as exploring marginalised voices and experiences within migration.[19]
Yousefzada created a short film in 2020, named Her Dreams are Bigger about garment workers in Bangladesh which was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.[20][21]
Yousefzada's work was reviewed as ‘one of the show’s finest works at the White Chapel Gallery (2023). In Osman Yousefzada’s work 'An Immigrant’s Room of Her Own' (2018), there's a bedroom scene, informed by Yousefzada’s Pakistani mother’s domestic spaces, rituals and habits in Birmingham.[22]
A chest of draws is filled with earth, a reference to the Muslim tradition of burying hair. A rope, evoking long hair, trails from a mannequin display head, around the carpeted floor of the installation, leading to a wall-based textile. It looks bodily, like an umbilical cord framing the tableau, perhaps linking it to Yousefzada’s own identity. On the floor are a bed, a tower of saucepans wrapped in clingfilm, a makeshift wardrobe and stacked laundry bags in which an immigrant’s whole life might be contained.
All around them are concealed objects, like those packages in Hiller’s work, only this time, they are sculpted ceramic vessels and candlesticks and such, wrapped in black PVC. The wrapping is an act that conceals a life, yet also protects it. Yousefzada based these items directly on his mother’s practice of swathing household objects. His work is both symbolic of the precarious nature of immigrants’ lives, but also a tender and complex portrait of a loved one and, by extension, himself.[23]
Yousefzada's show 'Queer Feet' (2023) at Charleston house, Firle, the heart of Bloomsbury escapism, included textile compositions feature painted canvases and collaged barricade tape, Afghan, Balouch and Turkish rugs, as well as found materials that are reminiscent of the embroidery the artist’s mother, a talented maker, would stitch onto table cloths. They are overlaid with depictions of male figures found in 1950s physique magazines, rendered in the distinctive black and yellow hazard tape, representing defiant queer bodies. The exhibition also features a new series of studies on paper created by Yousefzada during a residency at the Birmingham School of Art. Inspired by characters in the Falnama, a book of omens used by fortune tellers in Iran, India and Turkey during the 16th and 17th centuries. People seeking insight into the future would turn to a page of the Falnama at random, and interpret the text and colourful drawings to predict their future. Depicting powerful intersex guardians, Yousefzada creates these works as talismans or magical objects that protect or heal, and act as guides through the immigrant experience.[24]
Fashion
American vogue wrote ‘Yousefzada’s multidisciplinary work spans clothing, publishing, sculpture, video, and installation art, all broaching themes of inclusivity and social justice through the medium of fashion long before they became industry buzzwords’.[33]
Yousefzada launched his eponymous label, Osman, in 2008.[11] He earned a reputation at London's fashion weeks that year mostly by the black dresses he designed, which prompted the U.S. Vogue magazine to call him the "re-inventor of the Little Black Dress".[34]
Within a few years of launching his label, Yousefzada had become a "fashion powerhouse".[35] Some of his famous clients include Beyoncé, Emily Blunt and Lady Gaga.[11] Beyoncé wore an Osman dress at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards
