Juli Gudehus

Juli Gudehus is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. Comparing apples and oranges is her daily bread. Juli sees and establishes connections between phenomenons, people, and things. She has worked with and on signs since 1992. Language and everyday culture are rich sources for her multifaceted work.

Juli first gained recognition for her innovative translation of Genesis into a rich collection of existing icons. Her witty and thought-provoking combination of contemporary hieroglyphs like logos, traffic signs and pictograms turned the project into a classic of visual communication. The unprecedented bottom-up approach of her tuqtuli project makes her a pioneer in the field of pictographic communication.

Juli gives and gave lectures at conferences and universities, nationally and internationally, she gives workshops and seminars and teaches at numerous universities, including as a guest professor for integrated design and design methodology in the international master’s program at the Bauhaus University of Applied Sciences Saxony-Anhalt in Dessau, Germany.
Publications and contributions by her have appeared at renowned publishing housese, reviews and reports on her work, interviews and portraits were featured in national and international magazines, newspapers, television and radio programmes. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally.

tuqtuli – language-independent communication worldwide
Tuqtuli is a dialogical communication principle developed by Juli Gudehus where signs are lined up like words. It is useful wherever people lack a shared language, an interpreter and translation apps – such as when travelling, or with refugees. Tuqtuli can also be used in a more elaborate, vectorised form for longer-lasting messages – such as in informations and stories.
The project started in 2024 and since then has been at conferences, festivals, museums, schools and universities in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ivory Coast, Japan and the USA.