Yasmeen Nematt Alla is from many places but she is currently a settler on the unceeded and stolen lands of Tkaronto and Waawiyatanong, Turtle Island. Her practice creates machinations that attest to the existence of the Brown Disabled Queer Self, resisting systems programmed to forget us. She has most recently exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Winnipeg ON, Bronx River Art Centre in Bronx NY, Heaven Gallery in Chicago IL, and Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto ON. She has previously been an artist resident in Haystack Mountain School of Arts, Anderson Ranch Arts Centre, Banff Centre, ACRE, STEPs Public Art, UKAI Projects and La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse.

Grounded in ancient Egyptian rituals and contemporary Arab and Islamic narratives, she is interested in contextualizing collective histories of repression and resurgence towards erecting structures of futurist universes of subversion. She explores migrations as breaks and glitches in universes that remain unobserved. Ancient Egyptians etched who they were into stone for fear of being forgotten; she reckons she is doing the very same. Using performative objects, kinetics, sand, sound, adornment, touch, heat, her mother’s worrying, her father’s restraint, and her sisters’ joy, this practice of creation sanctifies lives lived out of spiteful stubbornness—subaltern voices that sing and scream, even if only to the void.