During September and October 2025 we had the pleasure to host Shaheen Ahmed as part of the programme Dreaming Suburbs Artist in Residency. He will present his work at the Seminar: Anti-colonial Urbanism and Critical Geography: Resistance, Memory, and Sound. The program is curated and produced by Giovanna Esposito Yussif for Museum of Impossible Forms.
Shaheen is a filmmaker from the Malabar Coast of Kerala, South India. His work explores memory and identity — particularly at the intersection of faith, intimacy, and collective spiritual imagination. He is in Helsinki as an Artist in Residence at the Museum of Impossible Forms as part of the Dreaming Suburbs Residency program. During his residency, Shaheen is continuing to develop ‘Naz̤ar’, a project that navigates the shifting terrain of visibility within migrant lives, focusing on South Asian Muslim communities across European cities.
His partner Daryna Mamaisur joined him during the residency. Daryna is a visual artist and filmmaker from Kyiv, Ukraine. Her practice combines art research, filmmaking, and photography, focusing on transformations of landscape and public space in relation to visual culture, memory, and political ecology. Her recent projects are personal and experimental films on migration, the limits of language, and the complex, intertwined realities of environment and war.
Please check their websites: https://shaheenahmed.site and https://darynamamaisur.com
Photo by Edris Samani