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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. Maria Ahmed and Sarah-Jane Field work with and in response to generative images, using collage strategies of fragmentation, mixing and displacement, provoking multiple readings and questions.

Generative images are placed in conversation with pictures from photography's messy history: darkroom mistakes, images for technical instruction, phone snaps, scans, stock images and reproductions ripped from old books. Through the rhythm of this presentation, images push and pull against one another in a performance of control and resistance.








Zine A5 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. Dimensions and materials variable.

︎︎︎Installation views at Photofusion
︎︎︎Exhibition text by David Bate
︎︎︎Review by Photomonitor
︎︎︎Digital installation



Slips and Burns
Artist’s book (work in progress), 2024. Mixed materials. Design by Maria Ahmed.







Edited excerpts of moving image work commissioned as part of Kipya Ki? An immersive virtual exhibition for Format International Photography Festival, 2022.

︎︎︎View (mouse + desktop)


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.

︎︎︎Installation views at Photofusion

︎︎︎Review by C4 Journal




Soft Knowledge
Artist’s Book, 2021. 184 x 237mm, Colour, Perfect Bound, printed on 130gsm Silk. Text and Design by Maria Ahmed, 96 pages.

Soft Knowledge is an ongoing collage project relating 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. 

︎︎︎Installation designs





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