As a painter, at first glance the masses see Jaffar’s work as expressionist abstract story telling. Jaffar’s dynamic and expressive canvases explore the complexities of human form and psyche. As an anthropologist as well as an artist, Jaffar combines art and academia through his research and practice that concerns itself with matters of multiculturalism, nostalgia, race, gender, class, and the lived experience of diasporas across South London. 

Matters of race, class and gender, multiculturalism and nostalgia can transcend the unnecessary academic jargon. Breaking down that ivory wall that divides the public where the living happens, through Jaffar Aly’s abstract story telling he educates, depicts untold and erased narratives. In other words, his choice of varying mediums produces an alternative form of knowledge production from the consolidated canon. 

Jaffar Aly’s practice has produced bodies of works which illustrate and highlight how the embodied and lived experience from those who dwell in the ‘Undercommons’ (F. Moten & S. Harney 2013) are of value and crucial in destabilising dominant discourses and decentring traditional Western / Eurocentric definitions of value and non-value. Introducing the voices of (an)Other in the mainstream has disrupted the flow of colonial reproduction but ideas of white supremacy, Eurocentric supremacy, and Western supremacy still run deep as the ‘unnamed political system’ (C.W. Mills 1999: 1) that has formed the contemporary, modern, and aesthetic world we live in today. Jaffar’s abstract story telling highlights the Absurd and helps decentre, destabilise, and decolonise.

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