Naimo Omar remakes, makes, composes and recomposes sound, video, print, text and sculpture, in reference to transnational conceptions of Somaalinimo/Somali-ness. The silence of Black life in the archives, and the enmeshment of coloniality in these silences, is resounding. 

She tracks a pattern of obsolescence and inertia in its lexis using tools developed within Black Feminist and Deconstructionist discourse. Ultimately, it is a hollowing act of her enfleshed diasporic subjectivity, this practice, a sifting and sifting of form.

Artist Statement:

A Somali poet’s skill in probing at life’s philosophies (metaphysics) is honed by ancestral systems of repetition and orality. Whether in women’s culinary traditions, music, politics or the advent of literacy in Somalia, it is the ritual of maahmaah (proverbs) which facilitates cultural production.

 The presented artworks draw material from an illustrative dictionary written in the decommissioned Osmanya alphabet, published in Xamar (Mogadishu), 1971. Pertinently, drawings were not required to be described with one word but at times with a sentence or term; then were paired with related tales or riddles. 

 Extrapolating on the dictionaries inconsistent yet generous system, Naimo Omar discerns the social framework of the two drawings and reiterates their imagery with photography. Abwaan (poet) Abdillahi Qarshi’s borrowed verse and domestic labour suggest crucial histories: Siad Barre’s infamous literacy campaign (and regime), and the dual politics of gender within nomadic and settled Somali societies. 

With its reverberating quality, the maahmaah attached to them simultaneously politicises and embeds these epochal Somali histories into Omar’s images.

Image credit: Naimo Omar, Isii Nafta. Photographed by Christo Crocker.