Variations in Black, Queer, and Otherwise: Works by Abdi Osman

Abdi Osman is a Somali-Canadian multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on questions of African-ness and Black-ness in the diaspora. In this multi-part exhibition Variations in Black, Queer, and Otherwise the artist incorporates sound, narrative, still and moving image, and fabric into his works that offer complex iterations of subjectivity.

“To begin with the otherwise”, writes Ashon Crawley (2016)^[1], “is to presume that whatever we have is not all that is possible”. The otherwise provocation opens the possibility of what can be represented, seen and thought about African-ness and Black-ness as it intersects with Muslim, queer and trans identities as they travel through and dwell in the diasporic location of the city we now know as Toronto. Crossing hard borders and elusive waters, landings are soft, tactile, even sensual. Beautiful fabrics gesture variations conjured in dreams, draped on bodies, and negotiated as we move through space. Always becoming, the process of discovery is an otherwise encounter – by way of the senses – and against colonial logics of looking, knowing and controlling.