Exiled Sudanese Artists Reflect on Their Country’s Art Scene, Devastated by an Ongoing Civil War

Rashid Diab, one of Sudan’s most prolific painters and art historians, sits next to his son, Yafil Mubarak, an artist, curator, and his father’s studio manager, for a video call from their current studio in Madrid. They are discussing the past, present, and future of their beloved country, from which they have lived in exile for nearly two years.

“Those who came and destroyed everything in our country—they’re not Sudanese,” Diab says. “So the question is, how do we preserve the real Sudanese?”

“What does that even mean?” Mubarak asks his father. “How do we keep the real Sudanese?”

“Real Sudanese are those who respect their people. It means you love your country, you love your people, and you want to see it change for the better,” Diab replies.

“So, to be Sudanese, you have to be a nationalist?” Mubarak presses. “You can’t be Sudanese if you’re not proud of Sudan?”

The two go back and forth like this for an hour, embodying two generations of Sudan: an elder tethered to hope and visions of the country he grew up with and a disheartened revolutionary looking toward a renewed future. Both deeply bound to the country they call home, both acutely aware of the fraught weight that belonging carries. “Losing memories is the worst thing you can imagine,” Diab said.

The outbreak of a civil war in Sudan in April 2023 dealt a devastating blow to the country’s art scene, which has recently been on the rise. In the capital city, Khartoum, galleries had just begun to flourish; formal institutions and community centers were taking shape; and discussions of a National Museum of Art were underway.

Now, it’s all gone—destroyed, abandoned, or left to ruin.

Before the war, Khartoum’s Downtown Gallery housed over 500 paintings in its storage, including major works by elder Sudanese artists as well as those by emerging ones. Since its founding in 2019, Downtown Gallery, which aims to “create a space that exhibits unrestricted, unfiltered, secular Sudanese art” and has a reputation for mounting exhibitions with an intergenerational mix of artists, has collaborated with around 68 artists in total, with 40 of them being officially represented by the gallery.

The gallery’s founder Rahiem Shadad said his gallery had lost between 60 to 80 paintings, but the scale nationwide is much larger. “I think in the thousands. I believe we’ve lost thousands of artworks,” he said. But it’s the loss of the elder artists’ works, which the gallery had not yet had a chance to catalogue, that pains him most. Pieces with no digital record are now effectively erased. (The Sudan Art Archive, a digital repository preserving a century of Sudanese art founded by gallerist Reem Aljeally, is one effort to stymie this loss.)

There is a now growing list of displaced Sudanese artists and curators working to preserve their country’s memory. Since the onset of the war, more than 12.5 million Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes—over a quarter of the country’s population. Among them is Yasmeen Abdullah, who now lives in Muscat, Oman. She fled her home in Khartoum when she was eight months pregnant, giving birth in a neighboring town during a power outage. She ultimately decided to leave Sudan for the sake of her son. As a way to earn income to support her family, she has been freelancing as a graphic designer. 

“I left everything,” Abdullah told ARTnews from her current home in Oman. “But art never left me, even in my darkest moments. In the midst of the darkness, there was light.”

Much of Abdullah’s work draws inspiration from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, capturing surreal, dreamlike scenes in which her figures go about their lives in flooding rooms, already ankle-deep.

In The Butterfly Effect (2024), for example, a lone, faceless figure sits in a golden-yellow field. She is surrounded by figures that resemble cotton plants, their bulbs aglow, flickering like dragonflies hovering in the fading light of dusk. Each bulb seems a placeholder for a memory—weightless, suspended in time, ripe for picking.

To make her paintings, she layers colors onto each other to create the background, taking breaks “until faces begin to emerge. I let the main character reveal herself to me, and then I build around her,” she said. Her paintings may look different from traditional Sudanese art, but Abdullah asserts that they are, in fact, “Sudanese—just look at the colors.”

But more importantly, she wants the works to stand as a testament to the time she has lived through and the resilience of her people. “When he’s older and can speak,” Abdullah said of her now two-year old son, “when he looks at my pieces, I want him to find himself within the layers of color. I don’t need to explain it—I just hope he sees parts of himself in a painting.”

For artist Ala Kheir, photography once allowed him to capture the beauty of Sudan. Through his lens, he saw the country in ways few others had, wandering the streets on quiet Friday mornings, before the city fully woke and the heat set in. “There’s a huge gap between the real Sudanese atmosphere and what we see in the media or the political landscape,” he said. “Sudan is incredibly diverse. There are concentrated majorities, but the country is mixed in extraordinary ways.”

Kheir, who is now nomadic and has returned to  Sudan at different points during the conflict, founded The Other Vision (TOV), a mentorship program dedicated to photography education and training in Sudan before the war. Now, the war has forced him to shift TOV to operate remotely outside Sudan and instead document the country’s destruction. “If I don’t do it, no one else will,” he said. “There are no foreign journalists, and if they were there, the focus would have been solely on the conflict—not the voices of the people, not the human side of the story.”

At one point in my conversation with Diab, the artist wonders what it means to create “African art,” when no longer living on the continent. Known for its vibrant color palettes and intricate depictions of Sudanese life, Diab’s work often explores the intersection of tradition and modernity. His paintings capture the rhythms of daily life—women draped in flowing tobes set against stark, open backdrops of the sky or desert in some, bustling market stalls in others. His art is a record of memory, now rendered even more poignant in exile.

“I am the same person everywhere. My body may move, but my spirit remains there,” he said of Khartoum, where he built his art studio and home, filled with objects collected over 50 years. He realized a lifelong dream there: designing and opening a cultural space, the Rashid Diab Arts Centre. That childhood dream has been shattered, much like the Centre, looted and destroyed. As the war enters its second year next month, hopes for a unified resurgence grow ever more distant, the country seemingly caught in an unending cycle of devastation. For many artists, the prospect of return feels increasingly out of reach.

Diab’s concern is a sentiment shared by many Sudanese artists. Yasmin Elnour, a Sudanese collage artist now living in London, makes pieces that explore her identity, shaped by her family’s history of being forced to leave Wadi Halfa, a Nubian town in northern Sudan, when it was submerged to make way for the Aswan Dam in the 1960s. At its core, her art speaks to possibility amid loss. Her collages layer imagery of women draped in tobes, floating through cosmic landscapes in shades of coral, white, and blue, or weeping rubies that cascade like tears.

“I often ask myself,” she told ARTnews, “Does identity need a physical place to exist? Does Nubia have to survive for us to continue existing?”

For now, Sudanese artists living in exile can only continue making their work. “This is the only thing I can do, and my father would agree,” Mubarak, Diab’s son, told ARTnews. “We’re not soldiers. We’re not freedom fighters. But we can preserve and present Sudan as ambassadors—because our actual ambassadors are worthless.”

He continued, “We can show the world that Sudan is more than endless civil war and bloodshed. We are thinkers, we are creators, we have philosophy, we have art.”