"Making Space is part of Osman Yousefzada's practice. It is not a passive gesture but a conscious one to welcome others, by shuffling up, pulling up a chair, or opening a door. It is a willingness to adapt or reconstruct one's own environment, habits, or attitudes to accommodate. A deliberate reshaping of boundaries to hold the multitudes of others."

This collective seminar will discuss Osman Yousefzada's latest solo exhibition I Hear Her Breathing at the Cooke Latham Gallery. Osman Yousefzada is a consummate storyteller, artist and poet who uses object and word to tell migrant stories that are both autobiographical and allegorical. Cooke Latham Gallery is annexed to a family home, I hear her breathing is Yousefzada's response to the unseen (but sometimes heard) domestic rituals that take place across the divide of the gallery wall. The home is acknowledged as an arena that is at once both intensely personal and inherently universal. Also, a safe space, a space from which you can dream. Scattered across the gallery floor are groupings of 'wrapped' ceramic objects, a homage to the plastic or material wrapped items brought to the United Kingdom by Yousefzada's mother when his family immigrated from Pakistan. Their supple folds and the idiosyncrasy of the knots that tie them are cast in clay; miniature monuments to the unseen women that wrapped them. Forever unopened they embody the idea of deferred enjoyment within immigrant communities and, perhaps, the reality of never having fully 'arrived'.