DARCH (Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel) have been comissioned by the Liverpool Biennale 2025 to make work responding to the theme of ‘Bedrock’. More coming soon…

Alt text: Dagget and Norbert from the tv show ‘The Angry Beavers’. Dagget is on the left, dark brown, bucktoothed, smiling with a red nose and black spikey hair. His hand is raised in the air gesturing the ‘okay’ sign. Norbert is on the right, beige, grinning, with a light brown nose. He is gesturing a thumbs up. Both characters are embracing each other with one arm.

DARCH (Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel) have been comissioned by Sub-Sahara Advisory Panels’ ‘The Good Ancestors’ project to carry out in person Grief/Rage Rituals with communities across Wales, following on from their film comission with Arcade Campfa. We are comitted to ensuring our communities have tools to be able to process grief, anger and injustice stemming from on going colonial violence.

Atl text: A bright red background with the words ‘Grief’ and ‘Rage’ written in Gujarati and Osmanya (the original Somali script). The words are written top to bottom with a line breaking through the middle of letters. On the left side of the line the letters are straight and alligned. On the right side of the line, the letters are unalligned and appear as if floating away.

Good Ancestors Project

I was invited by Heart of Glass in Merseyside / Liverpool to be ‘Reader-in-Residence’ at their annual gathering ‘With, For About’, and respond to their theme ‘When Words Fail’. Throughtout the day, I guided participants through a small workshop, ‘Letters from our Ancestors’ where I offered them a chance to connect to the past through ancestrals map and answer questions from their ancestors to help build the future.

I also presented a re-write of my text ‘Notes from Aarti’s Diary’, originally written for g39 Unite in 2019.

Alt text: Radha sitting on stage and reading. There is a large wooden stage with flip chart paper, drawings and rough sketches. Next to this are two white men, they are BSL interpreters the one on the right is the middle of signing, he is bald and wearing all black. The other has short brown hear and is relaxed, he is wearing a black top and grey trousers.

Behind the flip chart paper, Radha is sat on a blue chair reading from a piece of paper. She has brown skin, black glasses, black hair which is tied bac and she is wearing all black with a pink jacket. There is an empty blue chair next to her, and a coffee table with papers infront of her.

Above her is a screen with a drawing of two bright orange circles with blue centres. There are lines protruding from each of them, with dots in different positions. This is ‘Etsolstera’ an invented language where the position of each dot on a line indicates a letter.

Photo credit: With For About: When words fail, produced by Heart of Glass, 2024. Photo by Jazamin Sinclair.

Commissioned by Arcade Campfa, DARCH (Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel) researched different cultural rituals that create containers of processing and validating colonial/ancestral grief and liberatory rage, and to used this to create our own grief/rage ritual exploring the relationship between these two modes of expression trauma.

Watch the full film here: https://arcade-campfa.org/Aisha-Ajnabi-Radha-Patel

Alt Text: A still from the film Greif/Rage ritual. A burning forest with tall and short trees, tinted bright red and orange. In the center of the image, between the trees, is a bright orange flame falling from the sky.

Curated by Anthony Shapland for Made Gallery, Denbigh ‘AI OS EI DI’ was a group exhibition using language and understanding to introduce new thoughts, new ideas. I continued using Etsolstera, but this time experimented combing words and phrases with symbols and maps developed during ‘Finding Aarti’ and my residency at Made in Roath.

Alt Text: An ink and pen drawing on a white background. Etsolstera is an invented language using lines and dots to communicate letters. The position of each dot on a line dictates the letter, and each group of lines dictates a word. Here, the words are represented by two bright green circles forming a head and a body, overlaid with black lines and dots. They appear like creatures with lots of protruding legs. Each word is arranged from right to left, top to bottom, in 3 rows - four, three, one. It reads ‘Where there is prayer, there is direction, dedication’.

‘From Abergavenny to Anais Island’ is an audio story commissioned for Local 37 (curated by Lumin Radio for Peak Cymru). It tells the story of an annual pilgrimage to Anais Island, a beach on the Planet Lionel’s Star. Every year, beings from across the galaxy gather here to sleep, dream and rest. Portals to the Island exist all over Earth but there is heated debate about whether the Planet Earth has the right to participate, because of the hostile, militarised borders that span its continents. This story is interweaved with interviewee commentaries from my friends / neighbours Patrick, Natasha and Imogen answering the question ‘what’s the best dream you ever had’.

Alt Text: A still of ‘Anais Island’ from the film ‘Finding Aarti’. A blue and pink sky with dreamy, hazy clouds. In the center of the image, the sun blocks out the sand dunes below leaving a black and purple outline of tree branches. There is a protruding spectrum of light in the centre of the image.

Curated and led by Tina Pasotra, Mycelium brought together women of colour to come together around ideas of interconnectedness, health and rest in the Summer of 2022. We explored these in relation to the Gardens, which were founded and funded through wealth generated by the East India Company. Through a foundation rooted in care and the connective metaphor of mycelium, National Botanic Garden of Wales becomes a space for movement meditations, workshops, collective reading and guided walks/talks.

Alt Text: A microscopic and bird eye view of a yellow flower showing a cluser of buds. A tiny red insect is trapped in the between the buds.

During this two week residency, I spent time reading, researching and developing ancestral maps that appear in Finding Aarti and other works.

Alt Text: Ink on paper. This ancestral map, intended to guide the view back to their ancestors, is made up of lines, dots, triangles, spheres, and sonar waves interconnecting and protruding from one another.

Finding Aarti is a film and sequel to the text ‘Notes from Aarti’s Diary’, commissioned by g39 for ‘Intermission’. where her original protagonist’s sister travels the galaxy in search of her sibling. Written in a series of letters, she explores her relationship with land, other beings and planets through rituals and language. It was written following commissioned conversations with Simisolaoluwa Akande (Ojumo Ti Mo) and Tina Pasotra (But Where Are You Really From? / I Choose) and draw’s inspiration from Alia Syed's 'Fatima's Letter’.

The full film can be found here: https://g39.org/cgi-bin/website.cgi?place=exhibitions&id=5614

Finding Aarti has been shown at: Videotage in Hong Kong, Oriel y Bont in Cardiff, Made Gallery in Denbigh as part of the LUX Book Fair event ‘Print, Print, Print’. In 2023, it was selected for Nowness Asia’s ‘Earth Day’ programme and ‘Fake Your Death, Take a Seat’ curated by Ollie Dixon at g39. Extracts of the film and stills were included in TAPE collective’s ‘Free to Forage Zine’ and Nawr Magazine. It was also featured in a series of writing workshops on the climate crisis as part of the Lumin Journal Syllabus.

Alt Text: Still from 'the film ‘Finding Aarti’. Against a black background of outerspace and faint shooting yellow stars, is an overlaid image of two brown hands passing and taking a red fruit. The fruit appears like red bells, with long, thin green stems and pointed leaves. Beneath the hands is large green leaf and a cluster of the red fruits. The black and white caption reads ‘for a time when it understood who it was’.

Notes from Aarti’s diary was developed during my residency on g39’s UNITE Programme in 2019. Written as a series of diary entries, it tells the story of a group of people of colour who became trapped inside a spaceship at the National Museum of Cardiff and explored life without racism, ‘after a surge activated the vessel and sent them flying throughout the cosmos, until they landed on the Planet Kelvin’. Whilst there, the group experimented with language to try and articulate their new found freedom and developed a language called Etsolstera.

To accompany the text, the group asked people of colour in Wales to respond to questions describing what the future (a future without racism) would look like and translating their answers from English to Etsolstera. They collected the answers into two books.

View the books here

Alt text: A pink newspaper, dated 25th November 2018, folded in half. It reads ‘Residents trapped in Spaceship floating over Cardiff: Ten people, who became trapped in astronaut Tim Peake’s touring space craft last week, are now floating thousands of feet in the air over the Vale of Glamorgan.

The spaceship, which can reportedly reach alltitudes of 10,000 feet was last spotted flying over Caerphilly. Reports said the tour group were exploring the spaceships interior when an electrical fault cause the doors to slam shut, traipping them sindie for four days. This morning, South Wales Police confirmed that the aircraft activated and flew through the Museum’s roof, taking those inside along with it.

Curated and led by Laurel Hadleigh and Deborah Findlater, ‘Rites of Nature’ was a series of online workshops for Black people & People of Colour, interrogating the term ‘nature’, our personal relationships and practices with it, while exploring land rights through the creation of video pieces.

I made a short video and poem called ‘In the future, the future is now’.

If you woud like to see the full film, please get in touch.

Alt text: A muddy bank with a small stream lined with plant roots and spidery green plants. In the water is a reflection of tall trees and a faint, overlaid image of machinery and tools. One of the tools looks like a hairdryer, with a teal green nozzle.

‘I remember you, you are alive by rehearsal’ is a film work and story made for ‘Communion’, curated by Lumin (Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau Beakhouse) for Shift Gallery, Cardiff. It tells the story of the beings of ‘Lionel’s Star’ – a tiny pink planet beneath the planet Earth - who take apart the buildings in their cities, bury them in the ground and then rebuild them every year in a ritual that marks their victory against an oppressive empire.

Clips of the film were featured in Nawr Magazine

Alt text: Aperson in a green and white shirt stares at a projection on a wall. There are four images making up one larger image. Top left: Red wars planes in formation shooting across a blue sky. Bottom left: Large crowds gathered at a beach watching the sky. Top right: The Earth in outer space and a pair of large red hands praying to it. Bottom right: A series of black and white images, assembled to look like bricks. Each one showcases different films about building and bricklaying.