Louna Sbou
"So I think it definitely brought people together from the communities..."
Louna Sbou is a curator, mentor and cultural manager. She is director of Oyoun in Berlin, an anti-disciplinary arts center with a special focus on queer*feminist, decolonial and class-critical perspectives.
Her life experience as a queer Muslim and daughter of Moroccan-Amazigh migrant workers led her on an unconventional journey into artistic research and practice. This enabled her to actively engage in shaping contemporary curating while experimenting with a non-Western approach to collective creation, resilient team facilitation, and transnational solidarity.
She has curated numerous award-winning exhibition, performance and discourse programs including Un:Imaginable in Rwanda and Bosnia (2022/2023) with Hope Azeda, Moudjahidate* in Berlin (2022) with Nadja Makhlouf, Maya Inés Touam and Sarah El Hamed, Embodied Temporalities in Germany, Great Britain, Greece and the Czech Republic (2020-2022) with Ahmed Baba, Gugulethu Duma, Kopano Maroga and Sujatro Ghosh, Backbone (2021) with Mazen Khaddaj and cartographies of affect – in queer & now (2020) with Dr . Michaela Dudley, Kenza Mala Badi, Prince Emrah, Sanni Est, and many more.
As co-founder and curator of be'kech (Germany, 2016-2022), she developed a place of culture and knowledge production and worked with artists such as Dr. Tiffany Florvil, Maytha Alhassen, Panashe Chigumadzi, Lamin Fofana, Musa Okwonga, Médine Tidou and Tewa Barnosa together.
She also worked as an independent curator in Japan (2016-2019), where she developed a series of international performances and exhibitions for Doshisha University Kyoto, Sophia University Tokyo and the Federal Foreign Office, among others.
Prior to that she lived in Lebanon (2013-2015) and worked closely with the late artist Leila Alaoui and Nabil Canaan to found STATION Beirut, where she hosted the Photomed Festival, Beirut Design Week and exhibitions such as Helvetica Zebra by Donatella Bernardi and Ruins & Archeology presented by Frank Perrin.
In 2021/2022, Louna was invited to give lectures, workshops and seminars at internationally renowned institutions, including West Den Haag Museum, Transformation Marseille, Ubumuntu Kigali, Berliner Festspiele, Caisa Helsinki, Performing Arts Festival, Berlin University of the Arts, and Bozcaada jazz festival. She has also received various grants, including for fellowships in Japan, Germany and Greece.
She enjoyed her school and academic education in the USA, France, Finland, Germany and Great Britain. She studied law at the South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences and received a Masters degree in Cultural Entrepreneurship from the University of Wales UK.
Louna is afraid of heights, is a mother of two and has been vegan since 1991.
Cartographies of affect - in the queer and now
A 10-day festival attended by more than 40 artists, tracing narratives of queer history and (contemporary) resistance with the aim of creating transnational solidarity. The aim of the festival was to collect experiences and practices from different cultures living in Berlin and the “Global South”, while introducing the idea of intersectionality and showing how different forms of identification create synergies.
