Artists

Gor Soudan is a conceptual artist living and working between Kisumu and Nairobi, Kenya. His practice incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation, and ceremony and often reflects social relationships and interactions with the immediate environment. Soudan’s artistic practice is an organic process through which everyday material is transformed into powerful work.

During his early career, he created installation sculptures in response to the 2007 civil conflicts in Kenya. Human torso forms woven from the charred wire from street protests reflected on the socio-political dynamics of human agency. The work he produces provides an acute, often satirical observation of the rapid socio-political transformation Africa is undergoing. His practice has evolved with a continued psycho–spatial exploration of mark-making, inhabitation, and cohabitation.

His current research is focused on the forms and materiality of handmade agricultural interventions in rural and urban landscapes, considering how such interventions affect our relationship with the environment and how nurturing plants reflects not only the development of our imagination but also our overall communal development.

Soudan studied Sociology and Philosophy at Egerton University, Kenya and has had multiple solo exhibitions and group shows in Kenya, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany. This includes Kikulacho: Remains, waste and metonymy |||, Japanese Cultural Centre, Nairobi in 2018; Tokyo A La Carte, Tomio Kayama Gallery, Tokyo Japan; Dust Sheet Embroided Snow, Project Gallery Arundel, United Kingdom; and Gor Soudan, A Retrospective, Redhill Gallery, Limuru, Kenya in 2018. In 2014, he participated in Backers Residency, AIT in Tokyo Japan, and in 2017 he participated in the ICAF residency in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2022, Soudan was featured at 1-54 contemporary art fair with Circle Art Gallery in London to great success.

Biography courtesy of Circle Art Gallery.