Exhibiting Sudan

Amna Elidrissy is an architect specializing in living heritage curation and exhibition design. As a key member of Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH), she contributes to mapping, research, and curation efforts, developing datasets that document Sudan’s historical and cultural narratives.

Katarzyna (Kasia) Grabska is a feminist anthropologist and research professor, currently teaching at the University of Geneva Humanitarian Studies Centre and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. She works with visual media, art-based research, feminist methodologies, and participatory methodologies. Since 2002, she has been carrying out a longitudinal study of gender relation transformations among Nuer from South Sudan in Egypt, Kenya, South Sudan, and in Sudan. She has worked closely with artists and cultural institutions in integrating marginal voices and alternative perspectives, especially of refugees and migrants, into the cultural discourses. She was a co-coordinator of a project Lectures Alternatives at the Association of Intercultural Mediators AMIC (Geneva). Between 2020 and 2024, she led a research project INSPIRE, studying inspiration of artists coming from conflict and displacement background at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. She is a co-founder of INSPIRE Art Award. She also is a filmmaker. She is the author of among others Gender, Identity and Home: Nuer repatriation to South Sudan (2014), which received the Armory Talbot Prize in 2015, co-editor of Forced Migration: Why Rights Matter? (2008), and a co-writer of Adolescent Girls’ Migration in the Global South: Transitions into Adulthood (2019).

Helen Mallinson as part of Mallinson Architects and Engineers, is currently a co-director of the British Council Cultural Protection Fund project, Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage (SSLH) against Conflict and Climate Change. She is an experienced designer, teacher, academic, and senior manager. She has been working in Sudan since 2018, when she started as project manager for the Western Sudan Community Museums project under lead partners ICCROM-Sharjah and the British Institute of Eastern Africa.

Yafil Mubarak is a Sudanese curator. In 2020, he relocated to Sudan from Spain to direct Dara Art Gallery, while simultaneously managing and archiving the work of renowned Sudanese painter Rashid Diab. Over the past five years, Yafil has curated numerous exhibitions both in Sudan and internationally. Notably, in 2024, he curated a show at the LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Côte d’Ivoire and co-curated Sudan: A Visual Art Narrative, held in London in June—a landmark exhibition, highlighting the pioneers of Sudanese contemporary art. In addition to curatorial work, he is deeply involved in promoting Sudanese artists on the global stage and managing the careers of several painters.

Abdelrahiem (Rahiem) Shadad is a Sudanese cultural researcher and curator now based in Nairobi. He was previously the director of The Rest, a residency for displaced artists in Nairobi. He is passionate about shedding light on the conflict in Sudan and its underreported social consequences. Prior to the war, Rahiem ran the Downtown Gallery, Sudan’s fastest-growing gallery since 2019.

Neelima Jeychandran is an Assistant Professor of African Visual Culture in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar. She is an ethnographer, editor, and scholar who works on oceanic crossovers and material histories of West and East Africa and western India. She is co-editor of the book Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (Routledge, 2020) and the co-editor of the Verge journal issue on “Indian Ocean Studies, African-Asian Affinities” (2022), and the series co-editor of the Routledge Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia book series.