Asmaa Jama is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker.
Asmaa Jama works across text, painting, moving image and performance, with their practice deeply preoccupied with the image and texture of burning. Drawing from Islamic cosmology, they explore jinn and other beings made of fire as metaphors for spectres, ghostliness, and the crossing of realms—concepts that allow them to reckon with migration, loss, and the complexities of diaspora. Their work is equally concerned with reworking myths, particularly those rooted in East African tales, examining what myth and ritual reveal about the human condition: our beliefs, fears, and the stories we create to ensure our survival. Through this exploration of fire, spectres, and ancestral narratives, Jama creates a body of work that navigates transience and the liminal spaces between worlds.
Asmaa was the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (2024) and was commended for the Brunel African Poetry Prize (2022).
Asmaa was also the winner of the Art X Lagos prize (2023), and has undertaken residencies in Berlin, Alexandria, Marseille and Athens. They were also a resident artist at Somerset House Studios.
Their exhibition ‘Except this time nothing returns from the ashes’ toured at Spike Island, Bristol and Africa Centre, New York. And they exhibited at New Contemporaries (2024-2025).
They are currently a resident at Pervasive Media Studio and a studioholder at Spike Island.
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Image : Tom Whitson