Asma Istwani
Artist | Facilitator | Producer
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Asma is a mid-career artist working in London. She has worked with several arts institutions including Tate, Wellcome Collection and Somerset House on a variety of creative and socially engaged projects. She has also been commissioned to create bespoke pieces of artwork for brands and organisations such as Jo Malone London and Duke University Press.
Asma's creative practice explores the connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures. She has particular interest in examining women's health and beauty, alongside diasporic traditions and superstitions, and the intersections between these themes. Her approach combines print media, personal photography, and ephemera, integrating traditional analog assemblage with digital techniques to blend tactile elements with contemporary tools.
Asma is most interested in challenging and expanding limiting narratives, especially those concerning women from the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) diaspora.
Her ultimate goal is to inspire in herself as well as the viewer, a sense of rebellion from the issues that add to individual and collective feelings and realities of disempowerment. Given its accessibility and historical ties to activism she considers collage i.e. the act of re-appropriating imagery from sources that perpetuate oppressive ideologies as crucial to her practice as these techniques enable her to dismantle and rebuild familiar images into potent, subversive messages.
Asma is also the founder of RIOT SOUP, an art collective and community for Black and Brown women artists in London.
EXHIBITIONS
The Pilot with RIOT SOUP, The Art of Movement Gallery, London, March 2019
The Residency with RIOT SOUP, hARTslane Gallery, London, July 2019
Ajoyo with ATA RODO London, Deptford Does Art, London, January 2020
Photography, Print & Works on Paper, Candid Arts, London, February 2020
Meraki, A Collective Soul x ATA RODO x Friends in my Ends, Old Street Gallery, London, July 2021
Watan, Cafe Palestina, London, August 2021
Religion & Diversity, Get The Trolls Out, University of Westminster, London, March 2023