Maria Ahmed

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.

Digital sketchbook: (ongoing)

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. See ︎︎︎Installation views at Photofusion

︎︎︎Exhibition text by David Bate
︎︎︎Review by Photomonitor
︎︎︎Digital installation

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.

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

Heaven Speed the Chameleon installation view (CGI render) at Photofusion

The project was expanded into physical space including moving image for my Photofusion Select Award group show in 2020-1.

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.

INSTA @maria_a_ahmed