When Riz Ahmed feels lost in his creative endeavors, he asks two questions: Does it stretch me? Does it stretch culture?
Those questions have guided Ahmed to an Oscar and Emmy-winning acting career (The Long Goodbye; The Night Of, respectively), a boundary-pushing music catalog, and creating stories that have redefined who gets to be seen at the center of the frame. And now, in the latest chapter of his career, he’s posing those two questions to all creatives.
Last year, WePresent, the arts platform of file sharing service WeTransfer, announced Ahmed as their guest curator. It’s a role previously held by the likes of Marina Abramović, Solange Knowles, and Olafur Eliasson. Ahmed is building his guest curator agenda around a manifesto rooted in stretching yourself and culture. But it goes beyond just stepping out of your comfort zone or doing something that scares you. Ahmed’s framework calls for you to surrender your ego and lean into the more mystical side of creativity.
“I almost feel shy talking about it sometimes because it can sound pretentious or insane,” Ahmed says in the latest episode of Fast Company‘s podcast Creative Control. “But the further I go down the road of life, the more I know that life’s most transcendent moments are when you forget yourself. When you’re so present, it’s kind of like your sense of self dissolves into the moment. That’s the heart of creativity. That’s the heart of meaningful connection.”
In this episode of Creative Control, Ahmed explores more of his creative manifesto and his upcoming film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that ties directly into his vision of stretching culture.
Divine Creativity
Ahmed says that viewing creativity through a more mythical lens requires stretching beyond yourself and past your ego.
“What I find increasingly is that we’ve removed the language of transcendence and the language of mystery from how we think about creativity,” Ahmed says.
What he’s calling for now is something of a blend of Taoism and Sufism, i.e. a flow state that places you beyond yourself and closer to something more divine. “What it means to surrender control and be part of something bigger, to invite something bigger,” Ahmed explains.
Culture Shift
Ahmed is most interested in creativity that pushes culture forward. “I’m interested in creativity in that it is a major way of shifting culture and creating ripples in culture,” he says.
Take for example, The Long Goodbye. Ahmed and director Aneil Karia’s Oscar-winning short film focuses on a South Asian Muslim family preparing for a wedding. What should’ve remained a joyous day quickly devolves into chaos when a far right group storms the neighborhood. WePresent commissioned the project in 2019, setting in motion Ahmed’s relationship with the platform where he’s now guest curator. It’s a film that is sadly all the more relevant today given the increasingly divisive rhetoric and policies regarding immigration.
Ahmed recalls being shocked WePresent greenlit their idea given the subject matter. But he recognizes the impact of what WePresent is doing and calls for more companies to do the same.
“Who are those new Medicis? Who are those people that are stepping in to let artists be artists away from the demands of the marketplace?” Ahmed says.
As part his guest curatorship with WePresent, Ahmed is sharing his platform with five artists he sees who are in line with his vision of stretching culture: filmmakers Nadir Nahdi, Warda Mohamed, Imran Perretta; musician Raf Saperra; and poet Sarah Ghazal Ali.
His mission comes at a time when controlling forces across the social and political spheres are keen to greatly restrict what culture should and shouldn’t be.
So how can one stretch culture when those in power have such a narrow view of it?
“That’s a question for all of us as artists right now. And I think a question that almost comes before that is to ask what is the role of an artist?” Ahmed says. “I would say that the role of an artist is something that is not political. It’s actually transcends and predates the idea of the political. The role of the artist is to insist on our oneness. It’s to expand the scope of who and what is considered human.”
A New Kind of Hamlet
That mindset directly ties into Ahmed latest project: a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Directed by Karia and starring Ahmed as the titular character, this version of Hamlet holds on to Shakespeares words but infuses South Asian culture throughout.
Creating a version of Hamlet has been a passion project for Ahmed since he was first introduced to the work in high school. “ I felt like it was not for me,” Ahmed says. “It felt like the epitome of everything I was outside of.”
However, through his English teacher, he was able to see the overlap between Hamlet and his own lived experiences as a British South Asian.
“It’s a story about family duty, honor; who you can and can’t marry; spirituality; the family business—there’s all these elements,” Ahmed says. “When you think about it in those terms, it felt very real to me rather than feeling outdated.”
“And so it was really back then as a 17-year-old, I was like, ‘man, wouldn’t it be cool if we like did Hamlet, but set it in a community that wasn’t so different to mine. Wouldn’t that reframe it for people?”
Tied to the release of Hamlet, Ahmed teamed up with WePresent to hold a series of workshops and produce a short doc to help a new generation see what he saw in the play as a teenager and to further his goal of showing how malleable culture can, and should, be.
“I think at its best, that is what culture does,” Ahmed says. “We are asking people to step out of their comfort zone, out of their immediate experience and through that empathy engine of story, go to a new place and then recognize themselves in the other.”