Sufea Mohamad Noor – Guest Speaker

Sufea Mohamad Noor is an artist, curator and fundraiser, based in Liverpool. Her platform serves as a powerful advocate for inclusion, community, and diversity. With years of experience across various sectors and art industries, she has infused her creative vision into numerous mediums, showcasing her versatility and hard work across the board.

We started by learning about Sufea’s residency within Liverpool’s Independents Biennial, in 2021. For the Biennial, she worked with racially marginalised groups by carrying out academic research, looking into online activism and making people more aware of the issues people of colour deal with day to day. A lot of Sufea’s personal work is mainly dialogue based paintings sharing stories or researching statements people of colour have witnessed and what is normalised as ‘ok’ to say to people of colour amongst ignorant people.

Sufea was our first speaker this semester and I found her work, outlook and experience very informative. I really enjoyed her take on art, how she separates it into three categories of ‘Making for Others’, ‘Making with Others’ and ‘Making for Herself’, it’s a very simple concept but so relatable. My favourite creative practice of hers is her use of food and art to create community for more vulnerable people, how she brings normal people of the community and artists together through food. I feel this is really needed within society and especially since COVID19, a lot of people have lost their communities, loved ones and have no one to reach out too. It’s even more difficult for people of smaller minorities. This project was counted as ‘making art with others’ and is greatly seen throughout Liverpool and the South East and East Asian Network in Liverpool.

“I remember going to Metal as a teenager. I attended my first artist’s lunch and ever since then I’ve always thought, ‘oh my god, that’s amazing that you can use art and food to bring people together’.” – Sufea Mohamad Noor

A piece of work for hers she classed as ‘making art for others’ was her Assemble & Granby Workshop for Turner Prize, in 2015. Assemble is a London based collective that won the Turner Prize in 2015 for their Granby Four Streets Project in Liverpool. This work focused on creating public spaces. renovating houses in working-class areas, this was undertaken in Toxteth, Liverpool. Sufea was among one of the twelve collaborators in this project. Being from Liverpool, I really loved this project as not only showcased and improved our community during the project,  but it’s mproved more since this project with more art studios and galleries within the Toxteth area.

Finally, ‘making art for myself’ was such a unique take on art, as mentioned above a lot of her personal work is dialogue-based pieces, stating racially charged comments that are ‘normalised’ to say throughout society. Sufea also has more fun, light hearted text works about being a woman, jokes about politics and ‘swiping right for the cat’, dating jokes. We see a few bits of her work when visiting the Royal Standard as she has a work space there, as well as working on the board. 

Overall, I really loved seeing the work Sufea has done, how she has changed view points and contributed to society throughout her work. I spoke privately with her and found her very inspirational and similar to Rong Bao, she is making a huge difference to peoples outlook on compempory art and art overall. I’m very interested to see her future works within fundraising and how much change she will continue to make within Liverpool.

Words: 598

Bibliography

archdaily, 2015. Turner Prize. [Online] 
Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/778435/assemble-awarded-the-2015-turner-prize-for-granby-four-streets
[Accessed 23 april 2025].

assemblestudio, 2015. assemblestudio. [Online] 
Available at: https://www.assemblestudio.co.uk/projects/turner-prize-exhibition
[Accessed 23 april 2025].

independentsbiennial, 2021. independents biennial. [Online] 
Available at: https://independentsbiennial.com/artists-2021/sufea-mohamad-noor/
[Accessed 23 april 2025].

thestateofthearts, 2021. im-not-one-for-call-out-culture-interview-with-artist-sufea-mohamad-noor. [Online] 
Available at: https://www.thestateofthearts.co.uk/features/im-not-one-for-call-out-culture-interview-with-artist-sufea-mohamad-noor/
[Accessed 23 april 2025].