Esmaa Mohamoud is a Toronto-based African Canadian artist. Mohamoud is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates Black body politics, depicting aesthetically the paradoxes of Blackness, its hypervisibility and invisibility, concerning herself with the ways in which racialized bodies navigate spaces as figures where complex gender and racial dynamics are confronted, performed, and reimagined. Drawing on materials from the industries of sport, construction, and fashion, from used football helmets and textiles to concrete and re-purposed metal chains, Mohamoud unveils how the plantation slavery system and its post-slave expressions have both defied and supported conditions of human bondage (both mental and physical), yet also build communities of resistance and resiliency.

Mohamoud has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; and the Museum of Fine Arts Montreal, Canada. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: To the Hoop: Basketball and Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro; Human Capital, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada; and Garmenting: Costume and Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York. Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play In The Face of Certain Defeat, currently on view at Art Gallery of Hamilton is travelling through 2023.