Artist: Osman Yousefzada

Bolanle Contemporary presents A Home That Will Not Behave, a solo presentation by Osman Yousefzada. Marking the gallery’s first exhibition at No.9 Cork Street, the presentation brings together a new body of work that considers the home as a site of tension, memory, and embodied experience.

For Yousefzada, the home is never neutral. It is shaped by migration, silence, protection and control. Drawing on the figure of the jinn, understood within Islamic and South Asian cosmologies as beings that exist alongside the human world, he approaches the domestic interior as a space charged with unseen presence. Not metaphor, but atmosphere. Not fantasy, but inheritance.

Working across oil and acrylic pigment, fibre, collage, screen printing and embroidery, Yousefzada builds surfaces that feel constructed and unsettled at once. Textile and paint operate together. Pattern interrupts and conceals. Architecture bends into something closer to skin. His materials carry autobiography without illustration, allowing personal and collective histories to sit within the work without being resolved.

The paintings move between figuration and abstraction. Bodies fragment. Interiors press inward. Thresholds feel unstable. The domestic space becomes both refuge and restriction, a place where love, discipline, spirituality and imagination coexist.

A Home That Will Not Behave positions the home not as backdrop but as structure. A structure that shapes the body and is shaped by it. A space that holds contradiction. A space that refuses to be tidied into a single narrative.