198 | Witnesses

Witnesses

A two-person exhibition featuring London-based artists ihsan saad ihsan tahir and Amida Deen.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. — Audre Lorde

Witnesses explores the politics of the gaze: how we are seen, how we see ourselves, and how visibility shapes the way we live, relate and remember. Taking inspiration from the writings of Audre Lorde, the exhibition brings together two distinct but interconnected practices that consider witnessing as both an intimate act and a political position.

Amida Deen’s work is rooted in the Black British experience while celebrating her Sierra Leonean heritage. Her practice centres Black female subjectivity and focuses on everyday gestures, memory and care. She invites viewers to witness moments not often held in public view, offering a vision of selfhood beyond expectation.

ihsan saad ihsan tahir’s work examines how the Arab body has been racialised, dehumanised and cast as monstrous within dominant visual cultures. Working across carved wood, stained glass and installation, his practice draws on horror aesthetics, gothic architecture and countercultures to unpick systems of representation and reclaim space for subjectivity and survival.

Together, the artists consider the act of witnessing as a shared and layered encounter; one that holds the power to affirm, disrupt and transform.

The Private View takes place on 7 August 2025, 6-9pm, and the exhibition is accompanied by a curated public programme and playlist by Amida, that extend its sensory experience. Witnesses runs from 8 August to 11 September 2025 at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.

About the Artists

Amida Deen is a British-Sierra Leonean artist whose work reflects the perspective of a child of the diaspora. Her work is rooted in the Black British experience while celebrating her Sierra Leonean heritage.

Working primarily in oil painting, Deen creates fictional characters inspired by everyday life, capturing the vibrancy of working-class communities and the nuances of growing up in Hackney. Deen’s paintings are shaped by personal memories and influenced by Black British, African American, and West African films, which she reinterprets into narratives that balance familiarity with ambiguity. Colour plays a central role in her work. Yellow serves as the foundation of all her paintings, symbolising warmth and soul, while vibrant hues like orange reflect her family’s efforts to bring the glow of West Africa into London’s cold, magnolia-toned council estates.

Deen’s palette is informed by childhood memories, from lively parties to the rich vibrancy of everyday life. Positioned within the contemporary discourse on identity and community, her work explores themes of belonging, cultural memory, and resilience. It challenges stereotypes by celebrating the beauty and complexity of Black diasporic life. Approaching her practice with a focus on storytelling and representation, Deen aims to create work that resonates across cultures while remaining deeply rooted in her own experiences.

ihsan saad ihsan tahir Across painting, drawing, sculpture and writing, tahir produces works that revolve around notions of class, cross-cultural exchange, displacement and masculinity. His practice often examines narratives of migration, modern literature, personal histories and language, how we exchange these themes and how our relation to factuality is formed by those exchanges.

tahir's work is at once unpolished and serene, contextual codes and encrypted visuals - typically circulated in the mass media - is cut out from their original surroundings and brought together in classic sculptural form. He associates differing symbols and subjects, plucking text and common icons to offer new connotations, countercultures and constitutive representations. tahir attempts to reveal and challenge the ways in which we tend to accept existing portrayals and tropes in present-day.