SITAAD
Co directors Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan
www.sitaad.info
Contact
info.sitaad@gmail.com
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Current programme
Writing/with Archives Study Group
SITAAD Co-Director
Leyla Degan is a Somali-Italian artist and photography archivist based in Milan. Her practice spans photography archives, visual arts, and field research, engaging critically with colonial archives and questions of restitution in relation to Somalia. Her work draws on the history of colonial photography in Italy — a largely unexamined corpus — as a site of inquiry, counter-narration, and re-imagination, with particular attention to the experiences and memories carried within the diaspora.
Her work has since been exhibited internationally: at Tate Modern; at Acre Hub; at Soho House Rome in 2024, as part of Curating Black Art in Italy; at Triennale Milano, in Paradossi e Opportunità; and in Turin, in Quello che non poteva essere scritto fu cantato, developed in collaboration with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Degan co-directs SITAAD with Naima Hassan, an archival platform founded in 2022 that experiments with analogue methods, collective research, and site-specific interventions within (post)colonial archives.