Artists

Ayan Farah

Press release

Opening: Friday, 23 January 2026, 6–9 PM

Ayan Farah’s oeuvre is at once bold, tender, and vast. Her work exudes the essence of abstraction, re- rendering reality beyond accurate depiction, where shapes, colours, and gestures interact to arrive at something else. This refusal of literal representation is not entirely intentional for the artist but a form of release that occurs as she falls into the process of art-making. Farah believes in endless possibility and boundlessness in her practice. Through stitching, attaching, painting and making anew, her work breaks free from conventional boundaries generating new language forms. Born in Sharjah, in the UAE, to Somali parents, Farah grew up in Stockholm before relocating to the UK to study art. This biographic trajectory, in many ways, encapsulates her attentive relationship to geography, materiality, and fluidity. Movement—across place, time and climate—is integral to her practice. She frequently travels to expand her material repertoire and to experiment with techniques involving pigments, dyes and found matter. From foraging marigold in the nature reserve of Nacka in Stockholm, to searching for the indigo plant in Senegal which is essential to West African dye traditions, to collecting mud samples from the Dead Sea, Farah approaches the world with a spirit of enquiry. Like a scientist, she is interested in mixing elements and observing transformations— moments when the ordinary becomes unexpected and knowledge emerges through reaction. This process of searching and collating both expands and affirms her belief that nothing is static, ephemerality shapes everything, including art. In a contemporary culture that insists on discarding and moving on, Farah insists on resuscitation and close reflection. The textiles she incorporates in her work are often recycled, carrying with them histories and contexts. These materials function simultaneously as surfaces for painting and as subjects in their own right, readjusted into new textures, shapes, and patterns. She reanimates them, making them sites where past and present converge. They offer a ground onto which new marks can be inscribed, allowing memory, labour, and gesture to coexist. Farah demonstrates a rare sensitivity in creating encounters between abstract painting and textile practice, without subordinating one to the other. Her artworks resist fixed readings. Instead, they invite prolonged looking and sensory engagement, unfolding gradually through hue, tactility and scale. When the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko stated in a 1959 interview with LIFE magazine that ‘painting is not about an experience; it is an experience’, he articulated a belief in art’s capacity to operate beyond narrative or illustration. Farah’s work mirrors this position. Her artworks summon the viewer into an encounter that stirs the senses encouraging an embodied engagement. In doing so, abstraction becomes a site of connection where transformation is not only portrayed but felt.

Written by Tawanda Appiah