Art Auction - Arms Around the Child

Osman Yousefzada is a British-Pakistani interdisciplinary artist and writer, engaging with the representation, rupture and reimagining of the migration experience. He works across moving image, installation, sculpture, textile, and performance, referring to the socio-political issues of today. Osman’s practice is led by modes of storytelling, merging autobiography with fiction and ritual.
 
His work has been shown at notable international institutions including, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Wapping Project, London; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Ringling Museum, Florida; Lahore Museum, Pakistan; Design Museum, London; Lahore Biennale, Pakistan; and Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh. Osman is a research practitioner at the Royal College of Art, London and Visiting Fellow Jesus College, Cambridge University.
 
Osman’s practice has been described as "defiant", where the participating bodies throughout his work are presented as part objects that refuse to identify or conform. Most recently, his series of solo interventions titled What Is Seen & What Is Not was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London. Across three site-specific works, this presentation responded to the 75th anniversary of Pakistan and explored themes of displacement, movement, migration, and climate change.

In his memoir, The Go-Between (2022), set in Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s, alternative masculinities compete with strict gender roles while female erasure and honour-based violence are committed, even as empowering female friendships prevail. This first book was long listed for the Polari Prize and reviewed by Stephen Fry as "one of the greatest childhood memoirs of our time".