Bolanle Contemporary presents A Home That Will Not Behave, a solo presentation by Osman Yousefzada at No.9 Cork Street. Marking the gallery’s first exhibition at the space, the presentation brings together a new body of work that approaches the home as a charged and unstable site shaped by intimacy, memory and bodily presence.

Drawing on the figure of the jinn, understood within Islamic and South Asian cosmologies as beings that exist alongside the human world, Yousefzada considers the domestic interior as a space animated by unseen forces, emotional residue and latent desire. The home emerges not as a site of containment but as something porous and responsive, resistant to fixed order.

Working across oil and acrylic pigment, fibre, collage, screen printing, embroidery and hand painting, Yousefzada constructs tactile, layered surfaces that move between architecture and flesh. Pattern functions simultaneously as ornament and code. Fabric becomes archive. Paint registers gesture like a trace held within the wall. Across the works, narrative unfolds through material, reflecting on marginalisation, endurance and the domestic interior as a space of refuge, refusal and transformation.

Bodies dissolve into interiors and interiors take on bodily form. Walls soften, thresholds blur and textile surfaces absorb and conceal. The domestic space appears unsettled and sentient, carrying memory and secrecy within its structure.

Through A Home That Will Not Behave, Yousefzada positions the home not as backdrop but as an active presence, a space that remembers, resists and refuses to behave.

About the artist

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 Museum and the Dhaka Art Summit. Recent projects include site specific interventions at the V&A marking the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence and a major installation at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice presented in conjunction with the Biennale.

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.

For a full catalogue of available works, please contact:
enquiries@bolanletajudeen.com

For press enquiries, please contact:
Saffron Wicks — saffron@bolanlecontemporary.com