Dreaming Suburbs Residency 2025

We’re thrilled to welcome Shaheen Ahmed as the selected resident at the Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki) as part of the Dreaming Suburbs Residency Program 2025.

Shaheen Ahmed is a filmmaker from the Malabar Coast of Kerala, South India. A graduate of the DocNomads documentary filmmaking program, his work explores memory and identity—particularly at the intersection of faith, intimacy, and collective spiritual imagination.

During his residency, Shaheen will continue to develop his work Naz̤ar, a project that navigates the shifting terrain of visibility within migrant lives, with a focus on South Asian Muslim communities across European cities. Through stories, rituals, and everyday gestures—where visibility can be both refuge and risk— it listens to echoes of displacement and longing, tracing the ways in which memory, faith, and intimacy are held. The project renders its audio-visual fieldwork into interdisciplinary art practices that, in turn, assert the need to reclaim urban spaces against ghettoisation and the enforced invisibility of migrant lives. It engages with the overlooked geographies of migration and asks how these experiences might offer new ways of seeing, knowing, and reimagining the city.

The residency is supported by the EU Creative Europe programme and national co-financing from the Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI).

‍

‍