Archive of work by graduates from the renowned MFA Programme at GSA

Fairouz El Tom
16.678° -2.988°
Archival pigment print
147 × 261 cm
2022
Fairouz El Tom
-2.327° 36.041°
Archival pigment print
147 × 261 cm
2023
Fairouz El Tom
31.576° -6.773°
Archival pigment print
147 × 261 cm
2022
Fairouz El Tom
Glissant-Diawara
Archival pigment print
75 × 75 cm
2023
Fairouz El Tom
D for Darfur – II
Archival pigment print
160 × 300 cm
2021
Fairouz El Tom
Lips
Archival pigment print
87 × 130 cm
2019

Fairouz El Tom

Fairouz El Tom is a visual artist based in Geneva, Switzerland. Of Sudanese and Swiss origin, she grew up in cities across Sudan, India, Nepal, the United States and Switzerland. This fluidity of movement across borders and cultures instilled in her a fascination with human and natural diversity, as well as a questioning of identity construction and contemporary value systems. Although she works primarily in digital photography, her compositions defy disciplinary boundaries. Instead, her work dwells in the slippages between discourses, demonstrating both the relationality and the entanglement that underpin our way of viewing and making sense of the world around us.

El Tom’s process involves the careful layering of macro and micro imagery of elements of the human and the natural world. The abstract and multi-scalar works that are produced as a result dissolve and blur rigid boundaries, creating new terrains of relationality. Refusing an easy interpretation, her works move the viewer through conceptions of the ‘sublime’, the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘abject’, challenging us to question the role of aesthetics in society and their resultant implications on systems of value. Through the process of abstraction, El Tom explores themes of identity, multiplicity, opacity and fluidity. She produces futurescapes, quasi-landscapes that provide us with a new visual language that announces a future that already surrounds us. A future in which there is connection across difference and precarity, a future of restorative intimacy between the human and non-human.

Her work was presented at the 13th edition of Bamako Encounters in Mali and she has exhibited works in group shows in Glasgow. El Tom has been interviewed by Terralingua (2022) and her artwork was featured in Artnet (2023). In addition to the MFA, she holds an MA in International Educational Development from Columbia University. Before turning to art, she worked with the UN and other smaller development and human rights organisations.