A Song for the Xeedho – The Knot Makers
Fozia Ismail’s A Song for the Xeedho – The Knot Makers is an interactive installation of rope, knots and weavings centred on an endangered wedding basket. On view until 6 September 2026.
Presented at Whitechapel Gallery throughout Backyard Biennial: East, an 8-week, free, summer arts festival, the Xeedho wedding basket becomes a container for exploring how human and non-human knowledge, memory, and survival are transmitted collectively between Somali nomadic women across rural and urban landscapes.
Created collectively through weaving, ropemaking, and intricate knot-work, the basket is placed inside a cloth tensioned with knots that become a key part of the wedding ceremony. Ismail explores knots as objects that bind, create tension, conceal, and resist being undone, while also representing a survival skill essential to nomadic life.
The Xeedho becomes a container for exploring how human and non-human knowledge, memory, and survival are transmitted collectively between Somali nomadic women across rural and urban landscapes.
‘This project begins with a lost photograph. Taken in Somaliland in 1998, my mother sits with her sister and another woman against a bright blue wall, their hands moving quickly as they twist plant fibres into wedding rope. They speak and laugh from the sides of their mouths as they work, fibres held between their teeth, their fingers moving like mercury. It felt like watching a kind of magic, women transforming plants from the land into something strong enough to hold a house together.’
The installation will be activated throughout the exhibition with public events and closed community workshops.
A Song for the Xeedho – the Knot Makers is co-commissioned by Counterpoints Arts and Whitechapel Gallery.
Public Programme
A lively public programme of events accompanies the installation, providing additional context and the opportunity for conversation.
These include:
16 July, 7-8pm — In Conversation with Fozia Ismail
Join artist Fozia Ismail for the opening conversation of A Song for the Xeedho – the Knot Makers, her new commission for Backyard Biennial: East.
13 August, 6:30-8pm — Under the Open Sky screening + Q&A
Join us for a screening of Under the Open Sky, followed by a short Q&A with Director Sonum Sumaria and Yumna Kamel, founder of Earth Refuge. (Venue: BLOC, ArtsOne Building, Queen Mary University).
15 August, 2-3pm — Listening to the Xeedho Archive
Discover the sounds and stories that have shaped A Song for the Xeedho in this listening session and conversation with researcher Ibrahim Hirsi.
15 August, 4-5pm — Climate, Censorship & East African Futures
Layla Mahmood, East Africa Correspondent for The Observer, joins Mohammed Elnaiem from The Decolonial Centre for a conversation on climate, censorship and environmental change in East Africa.
20 August 6.30-9pm — A Song for the Xeedho LATE
Join artist Fozia Ismail and Orsod Malik, Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, for a conversation marking the final event in the A Song for the Xeedho public programme.
About Fozia Ismail
Fozia Ismail is a British Somali artist, founder of Arawelo Eats and co-founder of dhaqan collective. Her practice moves across food, sound, textiles and found objects to create works exploring migration, climate, identity and diasporic memory.
Rooted in Somali nomadic feminist pedagogy, her work approaches everyday cultural practices as living archives of care, knowledge and survival. Through collective acts of listening, eating, weaving and making, she reframes domestic and communal space as sites of shared authorship. Central to her practice are inherited materials and objects connected to her mother’s Somali nomadic roots – vessels, spices, textiles, cassette tapes and sound recordings, which she transforms into sculptural, time-based and archival works.
Fozia has exhibited internationally at the British Textile Biennale, Southbank Centre, Biennale Architettura Venice, Weltmuseum Wien, Playable Cities, Osaka and Jodhpur Art Week.
