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 is an archive platform co-directed by Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan. Founded in 2022 and drawing on sitaad, a devotional gathering organised by Somali women, it exists as a space for archival and curatorial research, publishing and knowledge production. Through experimental and attentive archival practices, SITAAD maps the Somali region as a contested zone shaped by colonial histories, linguistic multiplicities, and intersecting narratives within a global terrain.
Degan and Hassan are Affiliate Researchers at the Soomaal House Library & Archives Center. Their long-term projects include Transmigrating Cassettes and Studio Sawiro, supported by Soomaal House of Art, the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, and the Goethe-Institut. Their work has been presented at the Tate, Africa Centre NYC, Afterall, The Recovery Plan Florence, Open Resource Centre, and beyond.
About the Co-Directors
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.
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Naima Hassan is a Berlin-based researcher working across archival, curatorial, and editorial practices. Her work focuses on building transnational and epistemic infrastructures for African and Afro-diasporic art and cultural archives, engaging the public with these collections as sites for research, collaboration, and critical intervention. She is Managing Editor of Contemporary And (C&) Magazine and Project Lead at Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation, where she leads the AAL Lab and Affiliates Network and the Re:assemblages programme. She has contributed to international research networks, including TheMuseumsLab (Steering Board, 2023–25) and the Nieuwe Instituut’s New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures Working Group (2024–25). Hassan co-directs SITAAD with Leyla Degan, an archival platform founded in 2022 that experiments with analogue methods, collective research, and site-specific interventions within (post)colonial archives.
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Logo design
Kaamil A. Haider
Our logo is modelled on the letter S in the Kaddare writing system. The alphabet was invented in 1952 by Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare. It was officially recommended as the national script by the Somali Language Committee, a group of researchers and civil servants who standardized the Somali language. Subsequently, as a result of state economic restraints, the Latin alphabet was selected instead.
© SITAAD
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.