Designing Sudan

This panel showcases contemporary Sudanese artists working across multiple media platforms, representing the diversity of Sudan’s creative landscape through innovative artistic practice. The conversation focuses on artistic trends that demonstrate Sudan’s creative vitality and the importance of supporting emerging voices in contemporary cultural production. The panelists examine how contemporary creators employ artistic practice to navigate trauma, envision alternative futures, and challenge conventional social and political norms. The panel emphasizes how creativity is not only a response to necessity, but a tool for collective dreaming and a powerful force for establishing alternative political imaginings.

Speakers:

Rund Alarabi is a Sudanese artist and translator. She is currently doing her graduate studies at the Städelschule (Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Qutouf Elobaid is a writer and curator with a special interest in the Poetics of the Archive. In 2016, she co-founded Locale, a platform to exhibit, design, and collaborate with Sudanese artists. She is the author of My Poets Don’t Die, an anthology in the New-Generation African Poets Series.

Hadeel Eltayeb is a curator, writer, and oral historian focused on identity and cultural production. She is the Displays Curator at the Design Museum, leading on the annual PLATFORM and the Ralph Saltzman Prize displays. Her research interests include critical readings of the archive, negotiating narratives of ownership through oral histories, and negotiating the tension between individual, social, and public remembering through cultural practices. She is currently researching solidarity encounters in Sudan’s Modern Art scene via graphic illustration supported by Tate, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the British Art Network. She has recently contributed writing to Wes Anderson: The Archives, Tim Burton: Designing Worlds, and Recessed Space. She is a 2025 fellow of the New Architecture Writers with The Architectural Review and the Architectural Association.

Aala Sharfi is a Sudanese design director and founding member of Locale. Her work focuses on visual storytelling and branding. At Locale, she contributes to the design, publication, and exhibition of projects that engage with Sudanese archives and collective memory.

Moderator:

Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann is a researcher and curator with a focus on political violence, art, co-production of knowledge, and collective ways of working. Currently, she is working for the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. She investigates how political violence is negotiated, represented, and made tangible through various forms of knowledge. Resistant and decolonial approaches are central to her work as well as her engagement with creative forms of knowledge production and dissemination. In recent years, she has published in various media, curated numerous exhibitions, advised cultural institutions and led workshops on critical curatorial practice and politically engaged art.