Esmaa Mohamoud (Canadian, b. 1992), is a Toronto based African-Canadian artist. She holds a BFA from Western University (2014) and an MFA from OCAD University (2016). Recently, Mohamoud has exhibited in at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Montreal and the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery, USA. Upcoming exhibitions include: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, traveling from Museum London to: Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ottawa Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery, and The  Art Gallery of Alberta; Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art, curated by Dr. Alexandra Schwartz, Ph.D., Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA; and In These Truths, curated by Edreys Wajed, Aitina Fareed-Cooke, and Aaron Ott, Albright-Knox.

Esmaa Mohamoud is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates Black body politics, depicting aesthetically the paradoxes of Blackness, its hypervisibility and invisibility, concerning herself with the ways in which racialized bodies navigate spaces as figures where complex gender and racial dynamics are confronted, performed and reimagined. Through a range of media which includes photography, sculpture, installation and performance, her powerful imagery suggests deeper forces at play in games like basketball and football, exploring how race and sports (institutions that commoditize and dehumanize Black life) also function together as a means of social mobility and protest. Drawing on materials from the industries of sport, construction and fashion, from used football helmets and textiles, to concrete and re-purposed metal chains, Mohamoud unveils how the plantation slavery system and its post-slave expressions have both defied and supported conditions of human bondage (both mental and physical), yet also build communities of resistance and resiliency.

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