Sarah Abdu Bushra is a curator of visual and performing arts exhibitions. Her research interest lies in East Africa locality, sharpening its regional gaze, centering its archives and post-contemporary practices of art making. Her work facilitates the emergence of alternative exhibition-making methodologies and curatorial praxis.
She is a co-founder of Contemporary Nights, an Addis Ababa-based curatorial forum, founded on the bedrock of community, collaboration, and convergence. She directs CN’s annual artists residency cum companionship program, GOJO. Her approach to curating begins with understanding her work as a practice of care. She appreciates the rewards and challenges of finding her way from the entry points artists forge in their bodies of works, towards larger portals of connectivity that offer spaces of confluence. She mediates dialogues and ongoing conversations to make her curatorial practice a process grounded on collaboration.
She is the inaugural curatorial fellow at ARAK, the biggest Sub-Saharan visual arts collection in the Middle East. She is currently the editor in chief for the 20th edition of FRESH Seminars publication, organized by Circo Strada a European Network of Circus and outdoor Arts. She has written a book called, Movements Mean More, documenting Ethiopia’s traditional dances, navigating the country’s historical and cultural anchor and weaving its contemporary identity through movements. Her curatorial texts appear on What Could/Should Curating do, People Stories Project, GIDA Journal, among others. She studied visual arts at NYU Abu Dhabi, and maintain an itinerant practice in collaboration with cultural institutes and curatorial residency spaces across the globe.
Sarah Abdu Bushra
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