Jaffar Aly

Jaffar Aly (b. 1998, Zanzibar) is a visual artist and anthropologist living and working in London. His practice occupies the absurd edge of British political life, deploying cartoon logic, grotesque figuration, and deadpan humour to dissect the colonial anxieties, class performances, and social neuroses that define Black British experience. Working across painting, works on paper, and graphic design—with oil, acrylic, spray paint, and oil pastels on canvas, dust-sheets, window blinds, and recycled paper—his characters inhabit what has been described as the survival zone of those excluded from dominant social scripts. As both an anthropologist and artist, Aly combines art and academia through research and practice concerned with matters of multiculturalism, nostalgia, race, gender, class, and the lived experience of diasporas across South London, producing alternative forms of knowledge through abstract storytelling.