Maria Ahmed investigates historic and contemporary languages of the image through collage and appropriation, with a practice encompassing photography, books and moving image. She is a selected artist for the Wrong Biennale 2025-6, the world’s largest biennale of digital art. Her recent artist’s film, Epistemologies, was screened by Turku Video Arts festival in Finland in March 2025. Maria’s self-published artist’s books have been shortlisted for international book awards, including Images Vevey, Belfast Photofestival, Skinnerboox/ Fotografia Europea and Fiebre. Maria’s interactive moving image work The Smooth Space is the Habitat of the Nomad was commissioned by Format photography festival in 2022, as part of Kipya Ki (What’s New?).
INSTA @maria_a_ahmed
The Doughnut(W)hole group show, curated by Kim Shaw for the Wrong Biennale, online and in London, November 2025-March 2026
AARK 10 Dialog group show, Galleria Aski, Turku, Finland, curated by Renja Leino and Lilli Haapala, 2025
De-constructed,
B-Part Exhibition, Berlin, group show curated by the Photographic Exploration Project, 2025
Infinite Index, artist’s publication for ABC mail art project Pushing the Envelope - 99g curated by Lucy Helton at the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, 2025
Epistemologies artist’s film screening as part of Garden of Humanities, curated by Lily Haapala and hosted by video art festival Turku Art House, Finland, at Kino Kilta, 2025
Poetics of Error, group publication by Marie Molins (forthcoming)
Participant, Offprint London, Tate Modern, 2024/5
Participant, Peckham 24 A Bigger Book Fair, 2024/5
Artist in residence, AARK Finland, Korpo, 2022/3/4/5
Featured project, Philosophy and Photography Lab, 2024
Participant, Inventory Art Book Fair, 2024
Participant, Format Print Market, QUAD Derby, 2024
Pecha Kucha, Ambika P3 gallery, 2023
Participant, artist’s book workshop, Backbone Books, Berlin, 2023
Artist’s talk with Lucy Soutter and Sarah-Jane Field, Photofusion, 2023
Slips and Burns - solo exhibition, Photofusion, 2023
Curator: Katy Barron
TRACE Mentorship artist’s development scheme 2022-3 (online)
Format 22 Artist’s panel discussion with Ibby Azab, 2022 (online)
Format 22 multiplayer exhibition Kipya Ki? (What’s New?) 2022
Curators: Ibrahim Azab (UK) & Trevor Mukholi (Uganda) (online)
Select 21 Artist’s talk with Katy Barron, Photofusion, 2022 (online)
Select 21 Photofusion group show, 2022
Participant, London Creative Network 2021-2 (online)
Photofusion Salon group show, 2021
I Didn’t Lick it, Bruton Correspondence School, 2021 (mail art)
Source Graduate Photography Online, 2020
Awards:
Shortlisted Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2025
Shortlisted Belfast Photofestival, 2022
Shortlisted FE+ Skinnerboox Book Award, 2022
Shortlisted Fiebre Dummy Award, 2022
Shortlisted Images Vevey Book Award, 2021
Photofusion Select Award, 2021
Photofusion Graduate Prize, 2020
Texts:
Slips and Burns, Caroline Molloy, 2023, Photomonitor
Mixed Memories, David Bate, 2023
Heaven Speed the Chameleon, Calum Beaney 2021, C4 Journal
Education:
MA Photography Arts, University of Westminster, 2020
BA Hons English, Wadham College, University of Oxford
Teaching:
Arts University Bournemouth, online tutor (2024- present)
Kingston School of Art, 0.5 senior lecturer (2010-2025)
Qualifications:
Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Selected work:
Places of Articulation i: screenprinted book with digitally printed inserts, 2025
Epistemologies, 2025 (2 mins trailer) - digital video, 9mins.
epistemologies
imaginary, magical and mythical
fatter
- After Vilém Flusser
Composed of image fragments culled from the internet, old books and the artist’s own archive of work, Epistemologies describes ways of knowing – as echo in the body, ruptured metaphor and glitch epiphany.
In Pursuit of an Apparition Hands can Miss the Object is a collaborative project with Sarah-Jane Field, 2024.
The title is drawn from Vilem Flusser's prophetic 1985 text Into the Universe of Technical Images, which urges artists to creatively play and disrupt the "totalitarian circuitry" of contemporary image culture.
ZineA5 booklet, Maria Ahmed and Sarah-Jane Field, 2024. 48 pages including cover, on recycled natural uncoated paper 100gsm, cover 250gsm.
Slips and Burns is an experimental archive exploring the photograph as an unreliable surface. Images are subjected to physical and digital manipulation, mixing and masking, raising questions about the malleable nature of the archival image and the role of projection and fantasy in encountering images from the past. It was presented as a solo exhibition at Photofusion in 2023.
Slips and Burns
Artist’s book (work in progress). Mixed materials. Design by Maria Ahmed.
The Smooth Space is the Habitat of the Nomad, 2022
Edited excerpts of moving image work commissioned as part of Kipya Ki? An immersive virtual exhibition for Format International Photography Festival, 2022.
Edited excerpts of moving image work commissioned as part of Kipya Ki? An immersive virtual exhibition for Format International Photography Festival, 2022.
Heaven Speed the Chameleon
Artist’s Book, 2021. 210 x 275mm, Colour, Perfect Bound, printed on 130gsm Silk. Text and design by Maria Ahmed, 112 pages.
Heaven Speed the Chameleon describes a journey from early photography to a torrent of contemporary digital imagery. Photographs from the past collide with those from the present in dynamic collages and sequences which collapse and remake meaning. Stolen stock photos meet sticky ghosts of Empire: the archive is violently plundered and pushed towards uncertain futures.
︎︎︎Review by C4 Journal
Soft Knowledge, 2020
Artist’s Book, 2020. 184 x 237mm, Colour, Perfect Bound, printed on 130gsm Silk. Text and Design by Maria Ahmed, 96 pages.
Soft Knowledge relates to the idea that images enter an “afterlife” following their original uses. Images adhere and haunt, divorced of their origins and are subject to constant change through reappropriation, mixing, reprinting, digital circulation, manipulation and distortion. George Didi-Huberman defined Aby Warburg’s notion of the surviving image as “an image that, having lost its original use value and meaning, comes back, like a ghost, at a particular moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity". Through analogue and digital collage, Soft Knowledge explores these moments when images resurface, re-form and meld in unexpected ways today.
