Reem Aljeally (b. 1997) is a multifaceted artist whose work integrates architecture, visual arts, and curation. She is the Founder of The Muse multi studios (2019) and The Sudan Art Archive (2022), aiming to support, promote, and preserve visual arts in Sudan. Her artistic practice focuses on painting, installation, and printmaking exploring themes of movement, space, memory, and self-image. She has exhibited internationally in Germany, Spain, Russia, Portugal, The United States, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. Currently, she leads the Artists Development Program at Ubuntu Art Gallery in Cairo, continuing her artistic and curatorial endeavors.
She was also a part of the Anna Awards 2025.

Athi-Patra Ruga is a South African artist whose transdisciplinary practice coalesces performance, video, tapestry, painting, and sculpture.
Born ten years before South Africa’s first democratic elections, Ruga’s earlier work engaged with what 1994 meant for his generation. His work emerges from a generational experience of being raised within a hopeful miasma surrounding democratic transition, only to encounter the complex realities of post-apartheid South Africa.
This foundation has grown into an exploration of precarity, place and identity through practices of world-making and self-invention, evolving to fundamentally centre queer, femme and Black experiences. The creation of Azania, a fictional world that began as a critique of post-apartheid nationalism, represents Ruga’s most sustained engagement with mythology. As a world-building project, the work explores Xhosa mythology while also being rooted in questions of belonging and displacement, where Azania functions as both a critique and a utopia.
Performance and the performative, which Ruga describes as “a sense of immediacy and stepping into space”, are foundational to his practice. Yet performance, while immediate, is also paradoxically the most abstract medium in his work. Within his practice, he highlights processes of craftmaking, viewing craftsmen as inherently rebellious figures. His commitment to craftsmanship represents both material lineage and political resistance, connecting him to traditions of making that counter dominant narratives of production and value.
Ruga’s practice is entangled in paradox and productive tensions with an approach that is inherently protean, constantly evolving across mediums and engaging with the “trans” - transformation, transience, transgression - as a movement that allows for a radical exploration of self.
Athi-Patra Ruga’s solo exhibitions include Cameos from the Frontier at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, Lord, I gotta keep on (movin’) (2025) at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York, Amadoda on the Verge (2024),BKhz gallery in Johannesburg and iiNyanga Zonyaka,(2022) Norval Foundation, Cape Town, In Travesti (2021), Eva Presenhuber Gallery in New York and Of Gods, Rainbows and Omissions ( 2018) Somerset House London.
Notable Group exhibitions include, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, 2026 Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, USA Améfrica: Diasporic Connections in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection Espasio 23, Miami 2025 TRULY RURAL (2024) at the Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Italy, This is Not Africa – Unlearn What You Have Learned (2021) at the Aros Museum in Denmark, Kiss My Genders (2019) at Haywood Gallery in London, Radical Love, Ford Foundation,2019 New York, Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, Ravelled Threads (2018) at Sean Kelly Gallery in Seattle, Art Afrique (2017) at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris,