Artist · Sudan
Ahmed Umar
Ahmed Umar (born 1988) is a Sudanese-Norwegian artist based in Oslo. He grew up in a conservative family in Sudan and came to Norway as a refugee in 2008. Trained at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, he works with ceramics, textiles, jewellery, printmaking, photography and performance, drawing on Sudanese traditions to talk about faith, sexuality and the silencing of queer lives. He took part in the 2024 Venice Biennale.
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Ahmed Umar was born in Sudan in 1988 and grew up in a religious, conservative family. Sudan was then one of a handful of countries where same-sex relations could be punished by death, and in 2008 he left and came to Norway as a refugee. When he later came out publicly, many in the Sudanese community turned against him — a story told in the documentary The Art of Sin (2020).
He studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, taking a bachelor's degree in printmaking and then a master's in fine art in 2016. His work moves between materials: ceramics, embroidered and woven textiles, jewellery, prints, photographs and performances. Much of it draws on Sudanese culture, from the wedding traditions and crafts he grew up with to the Black pharaohs of the ancient kingdom of Kush, and uses them to tell personal stories about faith, desire, family and exile.
His work has been shown widely in Norway and internationally, including at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, where it was his first time at the Biennale Arte, and the National Museum in Oslo bought his Glowing Phalanges sculptures in 2024. He was among the four nominees for the Lorck Schive Art Award in 2023, and Frieze listed him among ten artists to watch in 2025.
In Venice he showed Talitin, The Third (2023), which enacts a Sudanese bridal dance that traditionally ends weeklong wedding celebrations.
How to look at an Umar: touch is the subject. The sculptures are assembled from skin, wood, plaster and antique amulets, and the textiles carry hand work, so go close and read the materials as you would a text. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The National Museum in Oslo holds the Glowing Phalanges works, and Oslo Contemporary represents him. Check each for what is on view. See our list of Sudanese artists and the Sudanese modernist Ibrahim El-Salahi.