CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The Muse Magazine Issue 04 (2026) – on “Site and Stance”

The Muse multi studios announces the fourth issue of The Muse Magazine, an interdisciplinary publication dedicated to critical writing, visual culture, and contemporary artistic discourse from Sudan and beyond. This issue explores “Site and Stance” as both a conceptual and political framework—asking how artists, researchers, writers, and cultural practitioners produce knowledge through practice, and how geography, memory, institutions, conflict, and everyday life shape artistic positions.

At a time when Sudan continues to undergo profound political, social, and cultural transformation, this issue seeks contributions that engage with art not merely as representation, but as a system of knowledge, resistance, and critical imagination. We welcome submissions from artists, curators, critics, architects, urban practitioners, researchers, and writers working across disciplines.

Themes include

Art as knowledge
Institutional critique and funding politics
Writing, and visual historiography
Art in public space and everyday life
Authorship, conceptual practice, and contemporary Sudanese art

Formats may include critical essays, research texts, interviews, visual essays, personal reflections, artistic projects, photography, and experimental editorial formats.

Submission deadline: 30th June 2026
Languages: Arabic & English
Email: themuse.sd@gmail.com

Read further on this issue’s theme below.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions are open to artists, curators, critics, researchers, architects, urban planners, writers, and cultural practitioners interested in visual culture, from Sudan and beyond.
Priority will be given to topics originating from Sudan or directly engaging with Sudan (contributors do not need to be Sudanese nationals).
Submissions may include:
- Critical essays
- Research papers
- Interviews
- Personal reflections or narrative essays
- Visual essays
- Artistic documentation
- Photography
- Experimental or hybrid editorial formats
This magazine strongly prioritizes interdisciplinary and research-based contributions.
Submissions must include original work or research.
Images and archival materials, where applicable, must be properly and clearly credited.
This fourth issue of The Muse Magazine will be published primarily online.

How to Submit

If you are a writer, researcher, artist, or someone engaged with arts and culture, and have previous experience or attempts related to the proposed context, you may submit your contribution via email to: themuse.sd@gmail.com

Please include:

Your complete text or proposed project
All accompanying visual materials
A short biography

Submissions are open to contributors of all nationalities and disciplines, provided the proposal aligns with the themes of the issue.

Submission Period: 16th May 2026 – 30th June 2026

Contribution Requirements

Original and unpublished articles or projects are preferred.

Participation is voluntary. No financial compensation is offered.

Critical Contributions

Maximum: 2,000 words
Images: 6–8 images

Artistic Projects

Maximum: 500 words
Images: 10 images

Articles

Maximum: 1,500 words
Images: 6–8 images

Note: Contributions may be submitted in either Arabic or English. All accepted contributions will be translated accordingly. Please attach your biography and all relevant supporting materials with your submission.

Proposed Theoretical Framework:

In this issue, we seek to investigate the deep connections between art as a form of knowledge and the Sudanese and regional realities, beginning from the premise that art is not merely a representation of reality, but rather a tool for penetrating, understanding, and deconstructing it. This journey begins with a central question: how is knowledge produced about the arts, and through the arts themselves? Through their daily practice in the studio, the artist does not merely produce an aesthetic object, but formulates a vital form of knowledge that emerges through engagement with material, memory, and lived experience.

When read through the lens of “site”, this artistic knowledge becomes a conscious response to the political and social conditions shaping Sudan today, where the act of painting cannot be separated from the act of thinking, and where the artwork itself becomes inseparable from philosophical inquiries into existence and identity. At the heart of this inquiry lies a tension between local forms of knowledge emerging from Sudan’s public sphere and the epistemic frameworks imposed by colonial institutions and subsequent forms of cultural hegemony. In this context, The Muse Magazine becomes a project aimed at reclaiming autonomy over the writing and documentation of artistic knowledge. Such documentation cannot be detached from art itself; rather, it extends it. Critical writing and visual documentation thus become acts of resistance that refuse dependency. From here, institutional critique emerges as a fundamental pillar—examining centralization within Sudanese art, questioning structures that confine art to select elites, and critically engaging with European supporting institutions whose funding policies and bureaucratic mechanisms often frame Sudanese creativity within externally constructed narratives. At the same time, there is an equally urgent need to critique local institutions, which at times operate through social hierarchies and power relations that obstruct the genuine circulation of artistic knowledge and limit the diversity of audiences.

The transition from production to reception requires an understanding of the aesthetics of everyday life, where art acquires its epistemic function through its presence in the spaces of dwelling, clothing, food, and daily living. Educational methodologies reflect this by positioning art as a means of knowledge, transforming the objects around us into laboratories of aesthetic and ethical consciousness. In this context, art becomes an ethical form of knowledge, restoring significance to the concept of authorship and reshaping the relationship between human beings and their environments.

When we ask: Does art become knowledge within the exhibition space, or beyond it? The answer lies in the ability of Sudanese art to move beyond the white walls of galleries and engage with the street, the region, and public life—becoming an active force in social transformation.

At its core, The Muse Magazine is an invitation to investigate art as an integrated intellectual and epistemic system. It pursues this by fostering a critical dialogue that brings together the artist’s lived practice, philosophical inquiry, and research, with the aim of liberating the Sudanese artistic imagination from dependency and stagnation.

The magazine aspires to offer one of the most mature and rigorous engagements with Sudanese visual arts and their regional extensions, grounded in the belief that the artwork and the critical text together form the foundation for constructing a resilient national visual identity—one capable of endurance, resistance, and confrontation.

From this position, the magazine seeks to situate art within a broader universal or holistic framework, one that allows Sudanese artistic practice to engage with local realities while participating in larger global conversations.

Proposed Themes:

These themes are proposed as open and flexible frameworks for writing and research, intended to encourage contributors to think critically and deeply about the artist’s site and stancewithin contemporary visual practice. They serve as an invitation to engage critically with artistic practice not as an isolated technical act, but as a living process of knowledge production—one that examines how art is formed as an epistemic practice capable of shaping our understanding of reality and its transformations in Sudan and the wider region.

Axis One: The Epistemology of Art (Art as Knowledge)This axis focuses on the epistemic function of art, moving beyond its decorative role toward understanding art as a system for producing knowledge.

Art and Epistemology: An exploration of how art functions as a tool for perceiving Sudanese and regional realities, and how aesthetic experience transforms into epistemic truth.
Artistic Practice as Research: Reframing the studio as a laboratory of knowledge production, where the artistic process itself becomes sociological and historical research.
Site and Stance: An analysis of how geographic and cultural site shape the artist’s intellectual and political stance, and how artistic discourse emerges from local contexts.

Axis Two: Sociology of Institutions and Critique of Artistic DiscourseThis axis examines the structures of power that govern the presentation and circulation of art, both locally and internationally.

Critique of Art Institutions and Centralization: A deconstruction of the dominance of the center—whether Khartoum or other major capitals—within the artistic landscape, and a critical examination of power structures within local institutions.
Funding Dynamics (European Institutions): An investigation into how European funding policies and bureaucratic systems shape Sudanese artistic production and impose exhibition frameworks aligned with external agendas.
Audience and Reception: Who is artistic discourse addressing? Cultural elites? Foreign funders? Or broader popular and regional publics?

Axis Three: Writing and Recording KnowledgeThis axis explores the mechanisms through which visual art is transformed into written material, and the politics governing that transition.

The Authority of Writing and Documentation: Who has the authority to historicize Sudanese art? How is power exercised through language and criticism in defining what constitutes “art” and what lies “outside the context”?
Art Between Exhibition Space and Public Space: An examination of how artistic knowledge transforms when it moves beyond the white walls of galleries into public space, and the extent of its independence from institutions.
The Organic Relationship Between Text and Image: Breaking the conventional divide between the artist and the writer, considering the documentation of artistic knowledge as inseparable from creative practice.

Axis Four: Manifestations of Knowledge in Everyday Life and EducationThis axis focuses on the applied role of art in shaping collective consciousness and educational systems.

Art and Educational Curricula: An analysis of how curricula use art as a means of introducing students to their environments—our homes, clothing, food, and health—transforming art into a tool for everyday knowledge.
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life: A study of the artistic dimensions embedded within the daily practices of Sudanese communities, and the discovery of aesthetic and epistemic value in ordinary life.
Art and Ethical Knowledge: An exploration of the relationship between beauty and ethical value, and how art contributes to the formation of ethical positions toward society and the region.

Axis Five: Conceptual Practice and the Centrality of Artistic AgencyThis axis addresses contemporary questions of artistic identity and intellectual ownership.

Authorship: A redefinition of the artist as a producer of vision and critical position—not merely a craftsperson or transmitter of visual heritage.
Conceptual Art in Sudan: A mapping of modern and contemporary artistic movements in Sudan that center the idea as the core of artistic production, and their relevance to current realities.

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