2023 Curatorial Research Fellow: Michelle Mlati

Mar 21, 2023

Through this Fellowship, Michelle Mlati will further her ongoing research into Sudanese and East African artists associated with The Forest and Desert School, a literary and artistic movement that emerged in Sudan in the 1960s.

Documenting, translating, and archiving works produced by affiliated artists, the research will focus on the complex network of African and Arab identities represented in the School and culminate in an exhibition. Mlati will investigate the lineage of artists, poets, writers, and creatives who shaped and have been shaped by the School, many of whose works remain untranslated and under-studied. The project contributes to a broader effort to bring greater visibility to Sudanese art and literature and builds on Mlati’s previous work, including a 2022 exhibition and research in Uganda and Kenya.

Michelle N. Mlati (b. 1993 South Africa) is a curator, urbanist, and appointed PhD researcher in architecture based in Brussels, Belgium at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, focusing on inclusive ecological landscape design. Her work centers on creating intersections between art and the architectural and urban design practices that span from the 1960s to the present through an intersectional environmentalist lens. She has guest lectured the series Curating Botanical Collections (2021), part of the Strategies for Art in Times of Change course convened by Dr. Portia Malatjie at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. As a curator, Michelle has worked with various artists in East Africa and continues independent practice experimenting with The Forest and Desert School, which emerged from Sudan in the 1960s as a school of literature and poetry that influenced artistic practices of multiple generations. Her most recent work is The Forest and Desert School Revisited (2022-23), a group show of 13 artists exhibited at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi and also in collaboration with Borderlands Art based in Uganda and Galerie Polaris in Paris.

This Curatorial Research Fellowship is made possible by the Marian Goodman Gallery Initiative in honor of the late Okwui Enwezor. Additional support is provided by ICI's Board of Trustees and Leadership Council.