Headshot by Ludovic Robert
WePresent’s guest curator for 2025 is the inimitable artist Riz Ahmed. We first collaborated with Riz back in 2020 on The Long Goodbye, his Oscar-winning short film, and since then have stayed in touch, waiting for the right moment to team up once again. Riz has always been an artist who uses his multi-faceted practice to connect audiences through culture, and at a time when the world seems increasingly disconnected, this feels more urgent than ever. Here, he tells us why in order to stretch culture, we need to first look inward.
When I have needed a compass to navigate my creative life, or felt lost and needed to find my feet again, I have always turned to two questions:
Does it stretch me?
Does it stretch culture?
These two considerations have always grounded me and reconnected me with what I feel I should be doing as an artist. That is because I believe "stretching yourself” goes to the heart of the creative process, and "stretching culture" is our most important creative purpose.
Stretching yourself, on one level, is just about trying new things. It’s about embracing the adventure and the challenge of new creative horizons, so that you can grow. So that you can be caught off balance and let the magic happen. As David Bowie put it, “If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area.”
But leaving your comfort zone isn’t just a way of embracing unpredictability and forcing you to develop new artistic muscles. It also serves a deeper function. It humbles you. More specifically, it helps you to get past your ego. Outside of the place where you feel in control and in charge. It forces you to surrender—to dig deeper than just your own reserves and to move forwards in a state of faith. It forces you to rely on, channel, and serve something bigger than your ego. Whether you call that luck, God, instinct, the subconscious, or your creative collaborators, the result is the same. You are reaching out beyond the bounds of your certainty, your knowledge, and yourself. In order to grow, the ego must surrender.
In my experience the humility of surrender births the deepest work. And the deepest work births in our hearts a humble surrender—where our creative souls are undefended by the illusion of control or grandiosity, and we are left in awe of how we are connected to something else—maybe even everything else. This is not a conviction so much as an observation. Ask any artist and they will tell you that after all their effort to control, and all their grand ideas and schemes fall apart, it’s something else, something deeper in themselves—or even outside of themselves—that finishes the job. I remember Yusuf Islam telling me about his best songs, and saying, “I have no idea where they came from.” It’s not about us. It’s not from us. That’s when the work is at its best.
There is a mystical element to this kind of framing, and deliberately so. Mystery is about not knowing, about cultivating and embracing the fact of not knowing, and seeing it as a strength. We don’t usually draw on spiritual or mystical language to talk about creativity anymore—especially not in our educational institutions where the creative fertility and potentiality of mystery is swapped out for tangible and measurable methods of optimization. Don’t get me wrong, we need the technical to craft our work, but we need the spiritual for it to transcend and in order for it to find a purpose.
In fact, for most of human history, spirituality and a relationship with the divine or the mystical was at the heart of the creative process. We would invoke the gods, the ancestors, the genii, the muses, or the Creator. Creativity, after all, is an act of faith. One that works best when we de-center ourselves and serve something bigger—the story, the vision, or dare I say it, the animating creative energy of the universe.
We seem to have forgotten (or suppressed out of a kind of modern embarrassment) that the creative journey—one of casting off the ego and connecting to something bigger—matches the spiritual journey exactly. But reintroducing this kind of language and framing into our creative process is what we are sorely in need of. The concept of ritual, the sacred, and sacrifice would bring our creative conversations more in line with what we are actually doing, when we are doing it to the highest level. It’s no coincidence that honoring and relying on meditative and spiritual principles like awareness, truth, and compassion usually makes the art better.
Stretching beyond yourself, and past the ego, is therefore something that I see as the heart of the creative process. The notion of "stretching culture" is different, but deeply connected to this. If stretching yourself is at the heart of the process, stretching culture is the purpose of creativity as I see it.
When I say “stretch culture” I mean offering the world new stories, perspectives, and characters to lose themselves in. Doing so opens up new creative possibilities for other artists to continue mining; expanding the canvas of culture. But significantly, it also takes audiences to places they have not been to before, and to somehow find ourselves there. This process stretches our idea of who we are, and cumulatively, it stretches culture.
The magic of art is that it allows us to recognize ourselves in each other, and to see the deepest part of ourselves in the deepest part of someone else’s personal offering. A mirror and a reflection of our hidden depths is presented to us in the artists’ work, someone who is often a total stranger separated from us by space and time. When we’re taken somewhere totally new, to a story or character or world we have no real-world relationship with, then the power of this process is amplified even further. We discover an element of ourselves in places and people we’d least expected to. Those whom we thought we had nothing in common with—or barely knew existed—it turns out, are us. And we are them. It reminds us that underneath the differences that separate us, we are one.
That’s why taking audiences to new places is extremely important, because at a time when the most dominant narratives of our time are “us versus them”, it’s worth remembering that the purpose of every truly creative offering is to stun us with the revelation that there is in fact, just us. I started out as an artist when the need to remind us of our oneness was severe, and divisive narratives were the dominant ones. That’s why I personally place such emphasis on this dimension of creativity. The times that we live in demand this of us.
But regardless of what time or place you find yourself in, this magical, unifying power of art is always important to remember. Because it is in fact the deepest purpose of story and of art. To connect, hold, and heal us in the discovery of our oneness.
Ultimately, stretching yourself and stretching culture go hand in hand. If you can get past your ego and out of your comfort zone, it’s more likely that you l will shake others out of theirs.
What we find when we manage to do this, is something bigger than ideas like “us”, “them”, and “I”. What we find is the thing that we are all a part of, our truest essence. The thing that joins us, and that’s inside of us all.
