Fozia Ismail: A Song for the Xeedho – The Knot Makers
Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 6 September 2026
Listen to a two-minute sample of A Song for Xeedho, the soundscape featured in Fozia Ismail's installation.
A knot that took a mother-in-law days to tie must be undone in minutes, in front of the whole wedding party, using nothing but wit. Riddles, poetry, teasing exchange: these are the tools. Get it wrong and the joke is on you. Get it right and you've proved something about who you are.
This is the Xeedho, the ceremonial Somali wedding basket at the heart of Fozia Ismail's new installation for Whitechapel Gallery's Backyard Biennial: East. Traditionally prepared by a mother-in-law for her new son-in-law, the basket holds preserved camel meat, ghee, spices, leather and shells, all bound together with rope deliberately hidden within its structure. The untying is a ritual in itself, a test of social intelligence passed down through observation and shared labour rather than instruction.
Ismail's installation began with an absence: a photograph, now lost, taken in Somaliland in 1998, showing the artist's mother and aunt twisting plant fibres into wedding rope against a bright blue wall. "It felt like watching a kind of magic," she says, "women transforming plants from the land into something strong enough to hold a house and a whole culture together." That missing image shapes everything here: rope, knots, woven forms and sculptural reinterpretations of nomadic objects, activated by a soundscape of Somali folk songs and family recordings that plays when visitors touch the ropes themselves. The recordings draw on archives held at Rome's Centro Studi Somali, layered with Ismail's own conversations with Somali nomadic elders, including members of her family.
The knot becomes a way of thinking as much as a technique. Drawing on writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Cade Bambara, Ismail treats it as a structure that holds multiple, sometimes contradictory strands without needing to resolve them, much as memory and migration rarely settle into a single, tidy account.
Climate breakdown runs through the work too. The Damal and Galool tree bark once used for wedding rope has become difficult to source amid ongoing drought, so nomadic women have adapted, repurposing plastic food sacks instead. "What is lost is not only the craft skills," Ismail explains, "but an entire ecosystem of knowledge about our relationship with plants and animals."
The work forms part of Backyard Biennial: East, Whitechapel Gallery's first community-driven biennial, marking its 125th anniversary year and bringing together over 40 local partners across East London's galleries, faith spaces and grassroots venues.
British Somali artist Fozia Ismail works across food, sound, textiles and found objects, drawing on her mother's nomadic heritage. Her project Camel Meat & Tapes established the participatory, oral approach she continues here, treating everyday practices as living archives rather than heritage to be preserved behind glass. As one elder told her, culture is best understood not as something fixed, but as a living companion.
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Further Information:
Fozia Ismail: A Song for the Xeedho is on show now at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 6 September 2026.
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Image Credits:
All images: Fozia Ismail: A Song for the Xeedho – The Knot Makers. Whitechapel Gallery Backyard Biennial. Photo Credits: Damian Griffiths