2023 McKnight Visual Arts Fellow: Kaamil A. Haider

 

Banner image: Ferric Consult (detail), 2025. Intaglio, 9 x 12". All photos by Russ White unless otherwise noted.

◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ 

This is the third in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2023 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2023 cohort includes Tia-Simone Gardner, Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, Sieng Lee, Mark Ostapchuk, and Lindsay Rhyner.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a McKnight Discussion Series:

Thursday, March 27, 2025: Adriel Luis (curator and artist) in conversation with Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, and Mark Ostapchuk

Thursday, April 10, 2025: Katie Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art) in conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner, Sieng Lee, and Lindsay Rhyner

◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ 

Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of MCAD.

 

When I was in high school, it seemed like every time I walked out the door, my mom would say the same thing: “Remember who you are.” I’ve thought about those four words for years — how dense and complicated a phrase it is, touching on the expectations of my parents, an awareness of class dynamics and social standing, and the community politics of being a preacher’s kid. I used to see a sense of implied shame in the saying, but the older I get, the more I think it was just good advice — meant not necessarily to limit my behaviors so much as to inform them.

In the abstract, my mom’s admonition might be considered a form of maangaro, the Somali word for a mother knowing what her child needs before the child realizes it themselves — a combination of wisdom and intuition. That generational wisdom is of great interest to Kaamil A. Haider, who used Maangaro as the title for a recent series of posters designed to document twelve of the proverbs his own mother repeated to him throughout his childhood. Haider’s practice weaves together art, design, installation, and archives in the pursuit of preserving, interpreting, and adding to the culture of his native Somalia, and Maangaro emodies all of that. When I arrive for our studio visit at Soomaal House of Art, where he is a co-founder, co-director, and archivist, there are a handful of these posters tacked up on the wall — a gorgeous tangle of red, blue, black, and green.

 

Maangaro, as seen during the author's studio visit and in detail. Top: photo by Russ White. Bottom: image courtesy of the artist's website.

 

The posters are simple but not straightforward. They document not only his mother’s proverbs — what he terms “oral heirlooms” that have been passed down for generations — but also a largely out-of-use Somali script called Kaddare. Each poster zooms in on individual bold, rounded block letters, highlighting the aesthetics of the typeface rather than the legibility of each letterform. But this is not just a graphic designer's aesthetic indulgence; it's also the point: not many people can read Kaddare anymore. It is one of several Somali scripts abandoned in the 20th century in favor of a Latin alphabet, and Haider’s interest in preserving the script is not just to save it and celebrate it but also to challenge his audience to reflect on its cultural erasure. Near the bottom of each poster, the full proverbs are spelled out in Kaddare, but no English translation is given. Only on the wall labels in an exhibition setting do you get to read his mother’s proverbs in a more widely legible script, printed in both Somali and English: “We are not wearing garments; we are wearing our minds,” reads one. Another declares, “One does not ride a tide from a distance.”

“Whenever she was sharing these proverbs with me, it didn't make sense when I was young,” he says, laughing. “I mean, I understood them, but it didn’t have a broader context for me.”

Haider was born in the town of Qoryooley, not far from the southeastern coast. “Growing up in the eighties,” he says, “my family really enjoyed art. In particular, theater was the big thing, but art, cinema, and music as well.” When the Somali Civil War broke out in 1991, Haider and his family fled, following a diasporic migration that landed them first in neighboring countries and then eventually here in Minnesota. He has only been able to return to Somalia twice, but he feels deeply connected to his country, his culture, and his people. Together with artists and organizers Khadijah Muse and Mohamud Mumin, Haider founded and has helped build Soomaal House of Art into a community center, art gallery, and launch pad for ideas and initiatives serving members of the Somali diaspora not just here in Minnesota but nationally and globally, as well.

 

Top: I Wonder... Art exhibition by kids at Soomaal House, 2023. Photo courtesy of Soomaal House of Art. Bottom: Attendees at Kaamil A. Haider's exhibition Soo Bood, Bood / Come Jump, Jump, a five-channel video installation at Gage Gallery, Augsburg University, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist's website.

 

The hard part, as with his mother’s oral heirlooms and the nearly forgotten letterforms, is the tenuous state of historical Somali archives. Much of it exists in the memories of elders, primarily in the form of proverbs and poetry, and very little record remains of Somali visual culture, especially during the 80 year period of colonial occupation, from the 1880s through 1960. Somalia fell prey to what has been termed the “Scramble for Africa,” in which a mere seven European countries colonized nearly the entire continent. In 1870, European powers controlled about 10% of Africa; by 1914, that number had risen to nearly 90. Somalia found itself carved up by no less than three European empires: Great Britain, Italy, and France, all jockeying for power and position, especially in relation to shipping routes between the Red and Arabian Seas. In the years after World War 2, Somalia declared independence, suffered a coup d’etat, prospered as a republic, and succumbed to the civil war in 1991, when Haider fled his home at the age of eight. “There’s a lot of complexity when it comes to Somali history,” he says. “And it’s funny how the arts led me to that path to think about how we do tell that story.”

The path began with postage stamps, the focus of his BFA thesis project at the College of Design at the University of Minnesota in 2017. Reflecting on the dissolution of the Somali postal service in the ‘90s, Haider began to consider the power of the humble postage stamp as a national symbol, a means for social connection, an economic engine, and a historical record. “My thesis was really looking into the historical stamps that we had, both the colonial and post-colonial, and then to think about what the postage stamps could look like in the present moment,” he says. In the end, he developed and exhibited 56 stamp designs, rendering landmarks, Somali wildlife, regional maps, cultural artifacts, and letters of the alphabet in his trademark visual style of vibrant, impactful colors illuminating simple, geometric designs.

 

Stamps of Somalia: Illuminating A Nation, College of Design, University of Minnesota, 2017. Images courtesy of the artist's website.

 

“That led me then to think about a lot of archiving because I had to do a lot of research,” he says — no easy task when you’re digging for details about a country on the other side of the planet that has no official national archive center. It can be profoundly decentering to realize you are not an expert on your own history, which is precisely the point of colonial campaigns to erase indigenous cultures. The imperative to “remember who you are” became Haider’s driving force, and while his practice of restoring and archiving long-lost histories is a great service to his community here in the Twin Cities, he is successful in this mission because it means so much to him as an individual. “For me, it’s also personal in the sense that we as Somalis, when are are born — especially at least back in the day — when your umbilical cord is cut, it is also buried in the house that you were born in,” he says. “So that connection always exists between you and where you were born.”

Tacked up next to the Maangaro posters and spread out on a table are a series of vintage photos Haider has collected, taken long before this birth and burial. White colonial officers sit at a table outdoors, being served lunch by Somali waiters. Six happy Somali toddlers sit in a row above the caption, “The first born Christian Somali.” A beautiful young woman smiles for a portrait; the caption on that reads, “East African Types — Somali.” The visuals that survived the colonial era, you realize, are propaganda, exoticizing the people and romanticizing the opportunities available to readers back in Europe — beautiful women, a righteous mission, and all the trappings of power. They are only part of the story of Somalia under colonial rule, of course, and you start to wonder what was just outside the frame of this European lens, what pictures were left untaken or undeveloped. What’s more, these are all photographs that Haider tracked down and found online — hundreds of them — for purchase. “I hope you can understand how that felt,” he says, “buying your history back in a way, with no backing of an institution.”

 

Top: Colonial photos found and purchased by the artist. Bottom: Initial installation detail of Kaana Xusuuso, Kanna Xus (Remember That One, and Commemorate This One), 2022.

 

That is the archivist in him at work, filling in the gaps in the record as best he can. The artist in him, I think, has a different motive: inviting an audience to view those gaps with empathy, anger, and imagination. In his 2022 exhibition Kaana Xusuuso, Kanna Xus (Remember That One, and Commemorate This One): Orality, Visuality and the Colonial Archive of Somalia, 1885-1960, Haider presented this research in two stages. For the first month of the show, visitors were met with empty frames painted the artist’s signature red, black, green, and blue. Affixed to the opposite walls were only the found photos — a stark and incomplete picture.

“I want the viewer to walk through my hardship,” he says with a wry chuckle. Here the blank walls of the Soomaal gallery mimicked both the dead ends Haider ran up against in his research and the colonial erasure of his culture itself. One large black rectangular frame was painted directly onto the cinder block wall, completely empty with only the caption “1885–1960.” In the exhibition’s second iteration, however, there was much more to engage with. Printed out in Somali and English were dozens of anti-colonial poems that Haider had either discovered in his research or documented from direct interviews with elders who had them memorized. The colorful frames now contained original artwork illustrating scenes from these poems — colorful posters created by artist Wasima Farah, who now works as a designer and creative strategist for Soomaal House of Art. In one, a figure clothed in white kneels inside a simple room of black, red, and blue. Beneath the person, in all caps: AAN OOYEE, ALBAABKA II XIDHA. The phrase translates to “Close the door, and let me cry,” and is a refrain from a resistance poem by Maxamed Ismaaciil (Barkhad-Cas) in 1958 that Haider documents in the show:

 

The man who blinded my grandfather,

The man who enslaved my father,

The man who purchased me,

The man who ruined my world,

If I knowingly cannot take my revenge against him,

Oh Adam, if I cannot cut off his head,

Lack of ability and strength placed me in this position,

I affectionately hate the sight of this man,

Close the door, and let me cry.

 

Installation and reception images from Kaana Xusuuso, Kanna Xus (Remember That One, and Commemorate This One), 2022. Photos courtesy of the artist's website and @soomaalhouse.

 

The poster still did not fill its deep blue frame, inviting the understanding that this picture is still not complete. The show included a variety of other poems, several other collaborative posters, and an installation mixing the vintage photos with hand-written notes, crumpled up documents, and a monitor playing the colonial propaganda from atop a pile of firewood. The final installation reads as though the archivist has had enough. Scrawled on the walls are dates that have been scratched out: 1885 - 1960, 1885 - 1977, 1885 - 2022, and finally, as though the artist had a eureka moment, “1885 - present!”

“The coloniality of thinking is still there,” Haider explains, “the debris is still there in terms of how we eat, how we socialize, what we think about the natural world, and also about the inner world itself as well. How you perceive the world and what you think of yourself, what you think of gender and religion and so forth.” The show, which was his thesis project for, this time, a Master’s Degree in Heritage Studies & Public History from the U, again strikes the balance between archive, artwork, and activism, updating the story of Somalia by pointing out what an incomplete picture we have of the place and its people. “When you're dealing with the Somali history and archives,” he says, “there's a lot of unknowns. And I wanted to place the audience in that kind of space where it's like you don't know a lot, but there's something there.”

His artistic practice is, of course, not just reporting on that cultural lineage but adding to it. “Normally when we think about archives,” he continues, “we think about just old documents, passports, wills, and so forth. But I've come to believe that these artworks that we create are also forms of archival documents.” Given enough time and distance, everything becomes history, and the archivist’s job is never done.

 

Kaamil A. Haider (center) speaks during a panel discussion for Kaana Xusuuso, Kanna Xus (Remember That One, and Commemorate This One), 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist's website.

 

At the back of the gallery, painted directly on the wall were the letters SNL, with the N rendered backwards. It’s a reference not to the TV show but to one of the only forms of visual resistance Haider came across in his research. The story goes that, every night at sundown, a woman by the name of Faadumo Xirsi Cabbane would paint these letters on a public wall in support of the Somali National League, a group of anti-colonialists agitating for Somali independence. Each day, the graffiti would get painted over, and each night, she would paint it again. Like a poem’s refrain, this repetition is indicative of the stubbornness of resistance and also of the practice of creating and sustaining culture itself. Ritual and repetition is culture — it’s the songs you sing, the prayers you speak, the clothes you wear day after day. It’s the poems and proverbs told and retold and, in the hands of an artist, reinterpreted and reinvented.

“The thing about migration is that you don't get to carry your cultural material with you, per se,” Haider says. “It's all sustained within, right? So it's like then you need places to activate these rituals, to activate these conversations, to bring people together, to think about these histories. It's something that has to be worked on.”

 

 

Up next for Haider is a residency at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, Tennessee, where he will be doing tests for another project, trying to figure out how to turn a poem into a film. Eventually the project will take him back to Somalia, he hopes, to shoot the finished piece. He has worked in video before, making abstract films of people pounding grain or washing themselves for prayer — rituals and repetitions of the body in service of something larger. They appear as people out of time. Slowing down, acting out of habit as much as memory.

 

The Annals of Echo: Digital Notes from 2017 (details), 2017. Photos by Russ White.

 

Before I leave, Haider shows me an oversized book he made during the first Trump administration, The Annals of Echo: Digital Notes from 2017, a printed-out archive of tweets and Facebook posts from that first turbulent year, each page slightly burned and distressed. The conversation turns to American politics, and the tragicomedy of it all. He recalls watching the January 6 insurrection as it happened: “All I could think was, we don't want this. Trust me, I've seen it. I've survived civil war. As long as civil war does not exist, I think there could be some hope in trying to rework things, because that chaos, it just takes over everything.”

Of course, Americans have been there before, too, though the memory is largely abstract to most of us today — alive only in our own grainy images and incomplete history lessons. Violence is a large part of the story of this continent, too, as is the "coloniality of thinking" Haider described. It affects and infects everyone in a place that has been subjected to conquest, perhaps the colonizer and his descendants most of all. As James Baldwin said in a 1963 interview, “It’s going to sound like a very shocking thing to say: I am not the victim here. I have been mistreated, that’s quite true. But you have been even more violently mistreated because you pretended I wasn’t real. The damage done to me, I may or may not survive. The damage done to you... is much more crucial.”

Remembering who you are is itself a practice, a ritual of repetition — a learning and sometimes an unlearning. And whether through archives or artworks or elders, it cannot be accomplished without remembering who you were, as well. That can be the hardest part, especially at a time when we are so quick, even eager, to forget. ◼︎ 

 

Poster illustrated by Wasima Farah, from Kaana Xusuuso, Kanna Xus (Remember That One, and Commemorate This One), 2022. Text reads: "Bashir was hanged in day-light, at a house near you, they uprooted a big shaded acacia tree, may God humiliate them."

 

To see more of Kaamil A. Haider's work, visit his website or Soomaal House of Art.