Ibrahim Ahmed

Some parts forgotten #6

In the series Some parts seem forgotten, found images from Ibrahim Ahmed’s father’s family albums are weaved together with self-portraits creating patchwork-like collages of lost or forgotten memories. For Ahmed, this ongoing body of work acts as a visual diary, with each iteration evolving as he delves deeper into his personal history and relationship to his own manhood. The project maps Ahmed’s father’s trajectory from farm boy in the North Delta, to a banker in the US, Kuwait, and Bahrain, embodying Nasser Era politics, to gaining ‘citizenship’ in the US. Using techniques involving editing, layering, cutting, and weaving enlarged copies of the original images, Ahmed composes these images into a map of masculinities; the body and person become a symbol of a complex terrain that places masculinity within several geographies and social strata, blurring the lines of specificity. The work is an experiment at processing and mining the past to rethink masculinity’s positioning in a contemporary world. As his self-portraits fold into his father’s archive, Ahmed foregrounds the fractured self, finding resonance in a man he once found distant. Through this intimate reading, Ahmed seeks to discover connections between his personal experience and the universal manifestations ? and trappings ? of masculinity.