Amado Alfadni Amado Alfadni
Amado Alfadni is an Egyptian-born Sudanese visual artist. His roots are bi-cultural. At home with his Sudanese family in Cairo he grew up with the stories about and cultural traditions of Sudan. At school and at his studies in Cairo he received another formative influence. There he discovered a different version of the black identity, different from the identity that he lived in family stories and within the diaspora community. At school he studied a history in which the image of Sudan was negative, while the media constructed the infamous image of the ‘black’ Arab. It is this clash between different constructions of Blackness that Alfadni had to endure, was confronted with and which influences most of his art.
His work has been exhibited internationally at (among others) Goethe Institute, Cairo 2007; AinHelwan Culture Palace, Cairo 2009; Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh U.S.A. 2012; Super Market Art Fair, Stockholm 2013; UAMO Art Festival, München 2013; Storm Künstlerforum, Bonn 2016; Buel Gallery, London 2020; Textile on, Diaspora Köln 2023;
Alfadni was a curator at Kamala Art Salon ‘African artists in Cairo’, Nabta Art Center Cairo 2012 en 2015; and at Detour, Vedionale, Bonn 2015.
Other projects of Amado Alfadni are (among others) Ateliers Sahm in Congo Brazzaville in 2018 and contributions at Campaigning Cairo: Perspectives on Visuality in Egypt, Columbia University Press 2013. Alfadni was artist in residence at (among others) Künstlerforum, Bonn, 2016; Jiwar, Barcelona in 2016-2017; Beyond Qafila Thania, Morocco 2017.
In 2024, Afrovibes Festival exhibits his work from Askari Soldiers at Framer Framed. This is one of Alfadni’s socio-political art projects on the history of the Askari (Arabic and Swahili for military soldier). Askari Soldiers consists of a series of digital photographs and portraits based on his archival research that portray soldiers as unknown martyrs associated with the colonial Anglo-Egyptian period.
