Fozia Ismail's Interactive Sound Installation on Somali Wedding Baskets Opens at Whitechapel Gallery

Fozia Ismail's 'A Song for the Xeedho – The Knot Makers' is an interactive sound installation at Whitechapel Gallery's Backyard Biennial: East, running from 15 July to 6 September 2026. The work centers on the endangered Somali wedding basket (Xeedho) and explores Somali nomadic women's knowledge, climate grief, and embodied practices. Co-commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and Counterpoints Arts, supported by Arts Council England, the installation features rope, knots, woven forms, and a touch-activated soundscape blending archival Somali folk songs from Roma Tre University with live recordings of nomadic elders, including Ismail's family. The Xeedho, a ceremonial basket prepared by a mother-in-law, contains preserved camel meat, ghee, spices, leather, and shells, with hidden ropes untied through riddles and poetry. Ismail draws on feminist literature by Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Cade Bambara, using the knot as a metaphor for non-linear stories of memory and identity. The work addresses ecological crisis: plants for wedding rope are disappearing due to drought, and nomadic women now adapt by using plastic food sack rope. Ismail resists exoticization, framing the practices as living acts of resistance against discrimination, Islamophobia, and extractive capitalism.