Sat 28 June, 6-11pm
| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | 11am–6pm |
| Wednesday | 11am–6pm |
| Thursday | 11am–9pm |
| Friday | 11am–6pm |
| Saturday | 11am–6pm |
| Sunday | 11am–6pm |
Access requirements
The Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making all of our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please contact access@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
Information about access on site at the gallery is available here https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit/access/
This includes information about Lift access; Borrowing wheelchairs & seating; Assistance Animals; Parking; Toilets and baby care facilities; Blind & Partially Sighted Visitors; Subtitles and transcripts; British Sign Language (BSL) and hearing induction loops; Deaf Messaging Service (DMS).
About This Event
This event takes place across Whitechapel Gallery, across multiple floors (all spaces have lift and stair access)
This event lasts approximately 5 hours.
This event is free of charge, but you must RSVP using the link on the page.
Please note: our spaces have limited capacities – we recommend arriving early to avoid disappointment. Depending on numbers, we may operate a one in-one out policy as well as sign-up sheets and waiting lists in selected areas of the gallery.
This event is suitable for those over the age of 16.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
We are unable to provide live closed captioning or CART for this event.
To the best of our knowledge, there are no planned disruptions to local transport on the date of the event.
Transport information
Our nearest train station – Aldgate East Underground (1 min) is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are Whitechapel (15 min), Shoreditch High Street (15 min) or Liverpool Street (15 min).
Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis.
A Study in Resilience, Sensorial Memory, and Diasporic Root Systems.
Embodying the spirit of Hibaaq (Cultures in Bloom), this year’s Numbi Fest invites you into a magical programme spanning live music, dance, poetry, film, literature, installations, conversation, and more.
There is a flower, known across shifting geographies as Hibaaq – a purple bloom that grows, improbably, at the margins: along cliff edges, in grasslands, and in soil considered inhospitable. It does not ask for permission to flourish. It simply does. Fragrant, tenacious, medicinal, sacred, this plant becomes in the context of this year’s Numbi Festival – less a botanical subject and more a metaphor: for diaspora, for resistance, for the poetics of endurance. This festival does not stage culture as spectacle; it considers it as an ecosystem: interdependent, fragile, improvisational.
Drawing on Somali heritage and its complex diasporic echoes, the festival traces how rhythm, movement, scent, and image form a kind of mycelial network – a living archive transmitted across bodies, borders, and breath.
Launching with Somali Freedom Week (26 June – 1 July), the festival opens and closes with acts of return and regeneration: walking workshops, community dialogues, and archival interventions forms of practice that honour process over product, intimacy over broadcast.
On Sat 28 June, Numbi Arts will bring Whitechapel Gallery to life for an immersive evening, less a programme than a sensorial constellation. Drumming circles pulse with the muscle memory of the continent; poetry and dance fold time into gesture; installations invoke the language of plants and place; and a book launch offers a textual companion to these hybrid forms. Here, no art form stands alone; each is in conversation with the others, braided like kin.
What emerges is not a fixed image of culture, but a question: What does it mean to bloom in the cracks?
This festival is organised in partnership with Numbi Arts.
For more information on the artists and the latest updates on the festival, follow @numbiarts on Instagram.
Entry is free, but RSVP using the booking link to let us know you’re coming!
Please note: our spaces have limited capacities – we recommend arriving early to avoid disappointment. Depending on numbers, we may operate a one in-one out policy as well as waiting lists in selected areas of the building.
6pm DJ Elmi Original
7pm Welcome
7.20pm Presentations: Numbi Arts Young Participants
7.40pm Drum Circle: Miriam Dubois
8.20pm Book Launch: Samatar Elmi
9.10pm Break
9.40pm Spoken Word Performance: Suli Breaks
10pm Headline Special Guest
10.20pm DJ Elmi Original
6pm Welcome
6.15pm Film 1: Success of Moss Side
7.15pm Film 2: A Story Left Behind
7.30pm Post-film conversation with Elmi Ali, Baka Bah, Asma Kabadeh, moderated by film writer Rahma Hassan
8.15pm Artists Conversation: Deeqa Ismail, Awo Abdi, Ifraax Aden & Abdimalig Ahmed, moderated by Mohamud Mumin
Awo Abdi is a multidisciplinary artist working across mixed media, digital art, and spatialstorytelling. Her practice interrogates cultural memory, identity, and ancestral legacy—bridging architectural precision with intimate personal narratives.
Trained in architecture, Awo brings a designer’s rigour to visual storytelling, evident in her debut solo exhibition Fortune Through Lineage (Manchester, 2025)—a poignant exploration of Somali heritage and familial connection. Her ongoing Digital Postcard Series reimagines Somali cities as collectible prints and wearable art, proving the commercial power of culture-driven design.
Beyond the gallery, Awo works as a UX designer, applying her cross-disciplinary ethos to create immersive, human-centred experiences.
Ifraax Aden is a multidisciplinary artist weaving writing, film, and archival practice into portals of memory and healing. Her work centers Black queer resistance, tracing its echoes across digital landscapes and ancestral timelines. In Enjoy The Ride While You’re Around, the filmmaker mourns the loss of her father and turns to the online space that served as her connection to home. Through a dreamlike blend of screen-captured memories, corrupted data, and abstract audio-visual language, the film journeys through the disorientation of digital grief. There is no clear narrative—only the echo of connection. The film asks: Can you mourn a space that you never embodied?
Abdimalig Ibrahim is a Somali artist and MA student at the RCA whose work explores themes of identity, representation, and community through portraiture and documentary photography. Rooted in personal experience, his practice centres the stories of individuals and communities that are often unheard, offering space for truth, presence, and visibility.
With a commitment to authenticity and care, Ibrahim uses photography as a form of storytelling that honours lived experience and preserves memory. His work reflects a deep sense of commitment and responsibility in how stories are told, particularly those that have historically been silenced or overlooked.
He is also co-producer and member of the Numbi Arts team, contributing to its mission of celebrating and archiving diasporic Somali culture through collaborative art-making and storytelling.
Elmi Ali is a North-West-based creative whose practice spans writing, directing, facilitating, translation, performance, and education. A graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University (Undergraduate in English Literature & Creative Writing; PostGraduate in Contemporary Literature, Film & Theory), his work interrogates the intersection of language, form, and creative resistance within global postcolonial narratives under late-stage capitalism. His stage work includes: Survival (Royal Exchange Co-Lab Festival, 7), Water Seeds Not Stones (Contact Flying Solo Festival, 2017/Contact in the City, 2018), Said the Seismograph About the Tremor (scratch performance, HOME Theatre’s Push
Festival,2018), Snow White Privilege (subversive pantomime, Nia Centre Manchester, 2020).
As curator of See My Dunya (2018–2019), Elmi platformed stories of Manchester’s Somali diaspora through exhibitions and programmes. His latest project, the documentary ‘The Success of Moss Side’, explores storytelling as a tool to restore agency to communities maligned by media tropes. The film premieres this September at Manchester’s Aviva Factory. When not creating, Elmi translates theory into praxis—whether through workshops, mentorship, or poetry that cracks open the mundane to reveal the political.
Baka Bah is a film producer who leverages cinema as a means to shift perceptions and open hearts. A second-year film student at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), he is diligent in his pursuit of compelling narratives. Baka has worked on numerous projects, from documenting the work of local organisations in Manchester to amplifying the voices of the city’s artists. He is the founder and director of See No Evil Studios, a Community
Interest Company (CIC) established to reclaim local storytelling from larger media organisations—entities that have consistently demonstrated neither the skill nor the ethical commitment required to honour their subjects. The studios’ debut long-form documentary, The Success of Moss Side, Produced by Bah and Directed by Elmi Ali seeks to reframe the infamous and hotly contested narrative of this neighbourhood through the eyes of those who call it home.
Suli Breaks has received recognition and endorsements from numerous celebrities, most notably Will Smith, who personally requested to have breakfast with Suli after being moved by his poem “I will not let an exam result decide my fate.” His TEDxHousesofParliament speech, viewed over 300,000 times, showcases his ability to captivate audiences with his words.
His reputation as a powerful speaker has led to invitations to prestigious events such as the United Nations National Commonwealth Day, where he performed in the presence of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He has also delivered keynotes for Google, The Times, and various institutions worldwide, covering topics ranging from artistic inspiration to empowering creatives to embrace entrepreneurship.
Miriam Dubois is a Drum Circle facilitator with 15 years of drumming experience with a heavy focus on West African styles. She has extensive training having been under the tutelage of World performing African Drum Masters such as Mohamed Gueye and Mamady Keita in Senegal.
Miriam’s performances include drumming in Glastonbury Festival, BT Sport Music Video, performing with Fuse ODG, and Drumming at the 2012 London Olympics as well as many Music Festivals around the UK.
Samatar Elmi is an award winning writer, musician and educator. His debut pamphlet, ‘Portrait of Colossus’ (flipped eye press, 2021), was selected as a PBS Pamphlet Choice. His stunning debut collection, ‘The Epic of Cader Idris’ (Bloomsbury, 2024), includes the 2021 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize winning poem ‘The Snails’. Poems have appeared widely including in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Magma, and Iota and anthologised in More Fiya, Filigree, After Plath, and The Echoing Gallery. Elmi is an Obsidian Fellow, flipped eye press associate poetry editor, and Scarf Magazine poetry editor.
Elmi has performed at Laugharne Festival, Latitude Festival, Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, for the Poetry Society, at the Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and Rich Mix. His work has been commended in the Guardian Poetry Roundup. He also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Warsan Shire on a Nation of Poets’. As Knomad Spock, his albums ‘Winter of Discontent’, ‘A Darker Light’ and ‘Through the Walls’ have been met with critical
acclaim (Clash, Afropunk, Buzzmag, Record Collector) and featured on BBC Radio 6, performing live in session for Janice Long (BBC Wales). He is currently working on his second full collection, ‘Our Eyes are Crystal Balls’ set to be published in 2026, and a fourth album in collaboration with Jehst, Diminutive Arthur and resuming the long-standing collaboration with Original Brew (Dan and Mark Richardson).
Rahma Hassan is a writer and poet from London. Graduating with a distinction in MA Film Studies, her dissertation examines the connection between Somali Cinema and ecological short films. Rahma is also part of the Numbi Arts team and co-produced the first exhibition of the Somali Museum UK ‘Any-Space-Whatever’ (2023) at Whitechapel Gallery.
Deeqa Ismail’s work drifts in the in-between, where spirit meets matter, the archival blurs, and the ephemeral resists fixing. Their practice transforms the organic into the inorganic: sound stiffens into shape, memory presses into surface. Through print, VHS, and scent, they trace how archives glitch, how stories stutter, leak, and reform across time.
Asma Kabadeh is a creative producer, with an extensive background in collaborative arts initiatives, making her directorial debut with Sheeko Laga Tagay / A Story Left Behind. Her work primarily focuses on uncovering untold stories, integrating documentary film and archival research to explore and record the histories and experiences of diaspora communities.
Mohamud Mumin is a photographer and artist, and the co-founder and Artistic Director of Soomaal House of Art, a Somali-American artists’ collective based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His responsibilities at Soomaal include curation, writing, artist development, documentation, and the presentation of exhibitions. Mumin is the recipient of numerous awards, and his work has been exhibited in community spaces, galleries, and museums across the United States and internationally.
Elmi Original is a sound artist and experimental musician whose work fuses Somali oral traditions with contemporary sonic experimentation. Drawing from hees, gabay, and the rhythms of the Somali diaspora, Elmi blends traditional instruments like the oud and durbaan with field recordings and electronic textures to create immersive, narrative-driven soundscapes.
Rooted in themes of memory, migration, and identity, Elmi reimagines cultural music not as nostalgia but as a living archive. Their performances and installations evoke both ancestral resonance and forward-thinking sound design—inviting listeners into a space where the past and future converge
@elmi.original on Instagram and Tiktok
@elmioriginal on YouTube
Faisal Salah, also known as FaceSoul, is a London-based Somali artist born in East Africa. From a young age, Faisal showed a passion for music, combining his love for singing, poetry, and storytelling as an escape from the challenges of inner-city living. At 19, he embarked on a journey around the world, using his voice to connect with diverse communities and share his story. These travels became transformative for Faisal as an artist, revealing the universal nature of human emotions and bridging apparent differences in race, language, and environment. Through his art, FaceSoul aspires to inspire others and create a sense of unity and understanding.
Numbi Arts is a Somali-originated, African-centred cross-arts organisation with a global reach, collaborating with local East London, regional, and international artists and educators. It delivers inclusive workshops and creates opportunities for holistic and diverse cultural programming.
