As Warsan Shire writes, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” And I did not leave home by choice

I left, because I had to. Being queer in The Gambia made my body unsafe and my existence unlivable. What followed was a rupture, a breaking open that continues to shape how I live, create art, move through this precarious world and imagine freedom. Today, I am whether by force or by becoming, a citizen of the world

Hey! I am Sunni Lamin Barrow (b. 1998) a Gambian-born, Netherlands-based literary artist, performing curator, and critical practitioner. The stage, as I’ve come to understand it, is both my battlefield and playground, an assembly point where I defend my life while rehearsing ways to live it. This tension is not incidental, it is the condition of my devotion to art

My work moves between spoken word poetry, visual and text-based theater, curatorial practices, and interdisciplinary performance. I begin with fragments, a title, a color, an image, a reference and build outward through collaboration, asking others to imagine with me beyond the limits of language and stage

Informed by psychology, I return often to interior earthskin of trauma, memories of griefs, queer love and survival, and the shifting grounds of identity. While rooted in African queer migratory realities, my work reaches toward more universal questions of belonging and making a presence and a voice land

I am not interested in instructing my audience. Instead I invite them to carry urgencies and the responsibility of remaining human in a world that forgets too easily. My performances and curated spaces hold grief and joy and love and loneliness and blackness and queerness, without demanding a resolution

In 2023, I premiered A Fist of Tongues, a spoken word theater research confronting trauma through a dialogue between my many selves. The piece was nominated for the BNG Bank Theater Prize and toured nationally through 2025

My work has been presented at institutions including the Van Gogh Museum, Huis Marseille, Kunsthal, Oerol Festival, and the Netherlands Theatre Festival etc

I am currently completing a Master’s at DAS Theatre Amsterdam, where I am developing Spoken Word Theater as a distinct genre

My dream as an artist is simple, it is to continue collaborating with good people and make good art, art that is honest enough that I can sleep at night, knowing my work has not betrayed me, my communities, my values and the world I am trying to imagine