Erased Twice: Sudanese Women Artists Between Revolution and War

Khartoum, 8 April 2019 — the sit-in outside the military headquarters. The inked slogan on her forearm (“Tasqut Bas” — “Just Fall”) was the central demand of the revolution against Omar al-Bashir. | Photograph: Ola A. Alsheikh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Two images have travelled from Sudan into the global art press in the last seven years. The first, from April 2019: a young woman in a white tobe and gold earrings, standing on a car, finger raised, leading a chant outside military headquarters in Khartoum. The second, from spring 2025: the emptied vitrines of the Sudan National Museum, mummy cases smashed on the floor, bullet casings among the rubble. Between these two images lies the story told in this article. It is a story about what a particular class of artists — Sudanese women — built, what is now being dismantled, who is dismantling it, and who profits from the dismantling.

It is also a story about what the European and North American art world has chosen to exhibit, collect, and celebrate — and what it has chosen not to notice.

1. The modernism that refused the Khartoum School

Before the revolution, before the war, before any of the images the international press now circulates, there was the long, patient argument that Sudanese women artists were already making from inside Sudanese modernism — against it.

The Khartoum School, the post-independence movement associated with Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ahmad Shibrain, and others, attempted to forge a national visual identity by combining Arabo-Islamic and African traditions with modernist abstraction.¹ It produced real work, but it also produced, as co-founders eventually conceded, a predominantly male view of what a Sudanese image should be. The intervention came in 1976, when Kamala Ibrahim Ishag — born in Omdurman in 1939, one of the first women to graduate from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum in 1963 — co-signed the Crystalist Manifesto with her students Muhammad Hamid Shaddad and Nayla El Tayib. The manifesto was published in the Khartoum newspaper al-Ayyam.²

The Crystalists defined the cosmos as “a project of a transparent crystal with no veil and eternal depth.” Distorted human faces in clear cubes; refusal of the craftsmanship-as-virtue logic that dominated the Khartoum School; rejection of the Hurufiyya movement’s reliance on Arabic calligraphy as the guarantor of artistic seriousness. Behind the avant-garde vocabulary sat a specific, political position: the Islamization of post-colonial Sudan was erasing women from public space, and “unveiling,” as a metaphor for what the Crystalists wanted art to do, was also a feminist demand.³

Ishag’s own practice took this further. She worked in the proximity of the zār, the women-led exorcism rite of central Sudan, as a painter whose canvases treat these ceremonies as living material.⁴ Her large figurative paintings show bodies folded into plants, heads intertwined with stems and roots, women in diffracted vision — the formal language of a culture in which the inner life of women, historically held in zār circles and domestic spaces, was translated into a pictorial argument with modernist Europe. The Serpentine exhibited her solo in London in 2022; the Sharjah Art Foundation holds her major retrospective collection; the Prince Claus Award came in 2019. When the 2023 war began, she was 84 years old, still living in Khartoum.⁵

The point worth stating directly: the gendered intervention in Sudanese visual art have been in the foundations for fifty years. What the 2019 revolution did was move it from gallery walls onto the streets — and, briefly, into international visibility.

The Zar Masters band in performance | Photograph: Ahmed Emad H, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

2. Walls that spoke, walls that were painted over

The image of Alaa Salah on the car outside the military headquarters, taken by photographer and activist Lana Haroun on 8 April 2019 with a Huawei smartphone, was circulated within hours. It was read internationally as an icon; it is worth reading it as a document. The chant Salah was leading — “They imprisoned us in the name of religion, burned us in the name of religion, killed us in the name of religion” — is a line from a poem by Azhari Mohamed Ali that had been chanted in Sudanese protests since 2011.⁶ Her white tobe was, as the historian Marie Grace Brown has noted, the deliberate citation of a specific lineage: the dress worn by Sudanese women in the anti-colonial movement, in the 1964 October Revolution, in the 1985 uprising against Nimeiry. The earring shape references bridal jewellery; the whole attire is a genealogy.⁷

It is also worth saying what Sudanese women’s rights activists said at the time — and what the international reception largely missed. Hala Al-Karib, a long-time Sudanese activist, welcomed the photograph but warned that its elevation into an international symbol risked flattening the much broader, more diverse women’s presence in the protests.⁸ Academic analysis published in 2020 made the point more sharply: the global “Kandaka” framing treated Salah, a light-skinned student from Khartoum, as a representative figure in a way that obscured Darfuri women, peripheral women, and the women who had kept anti-regime organising alive through three decades when the international press was not paying attention.⁹

On the walls of Khartoum Alaa Satir (b. 1990), trained as an architect at the University of Khartoum and then working as a graphic designer and illustrator, painted a yellow-and-blue mural in the Burri neighbourhood with the Sudanese Arabic inscription usually rendered as “Ladies, stand your ground — this is a women’s revolution.” She has since stated her reasoning plainly: “The street is very much traditionally dominated by men — it is different for a woman to take up this space.”¹⁰ Assil Diab, who tags as SudaLove, painted the faces of killed protesters on walls near their family homes — the Martyrs Graffiti series — in a practice she has continued since 2012.¹¹ Yasmeen Abdullah, an architect turned digital artist, produced the “Blue for Sudan” graphics that circulated after the Khartoum massacre of 3 June 2019, in which paramilitary forces killed 128 people and injured over 700 at the sit-in.¹² The colour blue was taken from the social media profile of Mohamed Hashim Mattar, a 26-year-old engineer killed at the sit-in. Yasmin Elnour, an architect by training, produced digital collages — her Instagram handle kandaka.khronicles cites Banksy, Da Vinci, and Sudanese iconography in equal measure.¹³

The sit-in murals were systematically painted over by security forces after the 3 June massacre, with the exception of those on the University of Khartoum campus, which protesters physically guarded.¹⁴ When the war broke out four years later, most of the surviving revolutionary murals were in the combat zone.

The Atbara Train, August 2019. The train became a symbol of the revolution’s reach beyond Khartoum. | Photograph: Osama Elfaki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

3. The war on the image

The war that began on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), commanded by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”), is now in its fourth year. The most widely cited death toll — around 150,000 — originates in congressional testimony by former US Special Envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello in May 2024, who estimated the real figure to be ten to fifteen times higher than the 15,000 then officially recorded. Subsequent academic modelling (Columbia University / University of Leuven, October 2024) produced a conservative estimate of over 62,000 direct and indirect deaths, with indications the actual toll is far higher.¹⁵ More than 14 million people are displaced. Famine has been formally declared in several regions. In September 2025, a UN Fact-Finding Mission concluded that both parties had committed violations “amounting to war crimes and, in some cases, crimes against humanity,” and that the RSF’s attacks on non-Arab communities in Darfur bore “the hallmarks of genocide.”¹⁶

The cultural destruction inside this conflict is not collateral. It has a shape, and that shape is political.

The Sudan National Museum, which held over 150,000 artefacts spanning the Palaeolithic through the Kushite, Napatan, Meroitic, Christian, and Islamic periods, was occupied by RSF forces from June 2023 until the SAF retook the area in March 2025. The estimates of what was lost are disputed and should be read as a range, not a fact: NCAM director Ghalia Garelnabi has cited figures between 60% and 90% destroyed or looted, with gold jewellery from the Napatan and Meroitic kingdoms among the objects removed.¹⁷ The Sultan Ali Dinar Palace Museum in El Fasher was shelled in January 2025; the Nyala Museum in South Darfur was converted into an RSF military base; the Geneina Museum’s curator, Bakri Hassan Ali, was killed along with his family. The libraries of Omdurman Ahlia University and the Mohamed Omer Bashir Centre for Sudanese Studies burned. In February 2026, Sudan University of Science and Technology reported that RSF fighters had burned the library of the College of Forestry and musical instruments for fuel.

The pattern of destruction escalated sharply in late 2025. Between 26 October and late November 2025, the RSF captured El Fasher — the last SAF stronghold in Darfur — and carried out what the UN Fact-Finding Mission subsequently classified as genocide against Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti Indigenous non-Arab communities. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, working from commercial satellite imagery, documented at least 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains, and a “systematic multi-week campaign to destroy evidence” through burial, burning, and removal of bodies. Researchers concluded “to high confidence” that RSF had killed people “likely in the tens of thousands” in the aftermath of the city’s fall, with the US Department of the Treasury sanctioning three RSF commanders in February 2026. The physical erasure of El Fasher’s population parallels, in real time, the cultural erasure this article describes — and in both cases the evidentiary record depends on systems (commercial satellites, digital archives) that remain structurally outside the protection of any international legal framework.¹⁸

Among artists specifically, the African Center for Peace and Justice Studies and the Sudanese Music Research Center documented more than 55 killed between April 2023 and September 2024 in their report The Tears of Guitars and the Cries of Museums.¹⁹ The named dead include Shaden Hussein (“Shaden Gardood”), a South Kordofani poet, singer, and researcher who had documented the cultural practices of the marginalised Al-Bagara community; she was shot in Omdurman on 13 May 2023, one day after posting Facebook videos criticising Islamist obstruction of humanitarian aid. She died at a SAF checkpoint after companions attempting to reach a hospital were delayed and further fired upon.²⁰ Asia Abdelmajid, Sudan’s first professional theatrical actress, was killed in Khartoum North (Bahri) in May 2024. The report also documents artists who died of treatable injuries after the medical system collapsed (the keyboardist Ibrahim Miko, the composer Bashir Abdelmajid), and artists who died from torture in detention (the percussionist Kamel Hasan, in Soba prison, August 2024).²¹

Sudan Natural History Museum, Khartoum, 2 November 2025. | Photograph: Moiz Mubark, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

4. The pipeline no one wants to look at

Here the story most international coverage tells ends — and the story worth telling begins. Because the question is not only what happened to the museum, but where the objects went, who paid for the weapons that levelled the buildings, and why none of this has produced sanctions against the external state most directly responsible.

The RSF is funded primarily through the Dubai gold market. Sudanese gold — mined in territory the RSF controls, smuggled across the borders with Chad, Libya, the Central African Republic and South Sudan — enters the UAE gold trade. Swissaid, using UN Comtrade data, documented that the UAE imported 29 tonnes of gold directly from Sudan in 2024, up from 17 tonnes the previous year, alongside large volumes routed through Egypt, Chad, and Libya.²² According to Sudan’s central bank, the UAE imported approximately 90% of Sudan’s official gold exports in the first half of 2025. The Sentry, a Washington-based investigative outfit, documented Dubai-based shell companies laundering illicit Sudanese gold on behalf of RSF financiers. The UAE was on the Financial Action Task Force grey list for precisely these reasons from 2022 to 2024.²³

The weapons pipeline runs in the other direction. US intelligence assessments, leaked UN panel reports, and detailed investigations by the New York Times, the Sunday Times, and the Atlantic Council have established that the UAE has been supplying the RSF with drones, howitzers, armoured vehicles, small arms, and ammunition, primarily routed through Chad.²⁴ The UAE denies this publicly and categorically. In March 2025, Sudan filed a case against the UAE at the International Court of Justice, alleging complicity in genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. On 5 May 2025, the ICJ dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds: the UAE, when it acceded to the Convention, had entered a reservation to the jurisdiction clause. The Court did not examine the merits of the allegations.²⁵

This is the structural architecture against which Sudanese cultural destruction has to be read. The looting of the National Museum is not a consequence of chaos; it is a consequence of a militia that operates inside a transnational revenue system for which the central node is a Gulf state that is simultaneously a close Western strategic partner, a major buyer of US and European weapons, and a primary investor in European assets. No EU or US sanctions have been imposed on UAE entities for their role in arming or financing the RSF. Some looted Sudanese artefacts have been seen on eBay; Sudanese officials strongly suspect others are in the UAE.²⁶

When Western institutions exhibit contemporary Sudanese art while their governments decline to sanction the most plausible external sponsor of the regime destroying Sudan’s cultural infrastructure, the word for that relationship is not “solidarity.” It is something closer to curatorial extraction.

5. The exile economy

The artists who survived the first months of the war mostly left. Cairo, Nairobi, Muscat, and Kampala are the principal hubs. Each has its own conditions; none are neutral.

Reem Aljeally (b. 1997), founder of The Muse multi studios in Khartoum in 2019 and a curator and painter whose figurative work concentrates on women’s interior life, is now based in Cairo.²⁷ Her Cairo is not a hospitable host city. Egypt’s legal framework for Sudanese refugees has been tightened since the war began: residency permits are costly and precarious, work authorisation is difficult, police harassment of Sudanese is documented.²⁸ Artists arrive as refugees, find that refugee status provides neither stable income nor professional recognition, and — in Aljeally’s phrase to Dazed MENA — confront the gap between “we still exist and we’re still breathing, and that’s a miracle” and the fact that the work of cultural preservation is “entirely unpaid” and often “seen as menial.”²⁹

Yasmeen Abdullah, displaced to Muscat, Oman, described to Contemporary And the loss of over forty of her own artworks in the war — many without a single surviving photograph. “That moment made me realize the urgency of preserving not only our art, but also our cultural memory and emotional heritage.”³⁰

Sarah Elawad (b. in London, Sudanese parentage, now based in Brooklyn) worked in 2025 with The Africa Center on Fifth Avenue in New York on the installation When the War is Over, on view until May 2026. Elawad’s vocabulary is the tobe — not as nostalgia but as working material. The installation’s title comes from a line by the Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo: “When the war is over I will make space for my feelings.”³¹ Elawad’s family home in Sudan, where she first encountered the tobe-wearing elders who shaped her visual imagination, has been destroyed. Nearly all her extended family has fled. Her work, she says, responds to loss “through form, texture, and symbolism” rather than through documentary depiction — a strategic refusal of the atrocity-image that the international media consumes and then discards.³²

The exile condition produces a specific aesthetic pressure. The artists who stayed in Sudan are working under bombing; those who left are working inside the refugee economy. Neither produces stable conditions for sustained practice. What it does produce is a body of work whose material — fabric, scan, digital collage, fragmentary archive — registers precisely the discontinuity of the conditions under which it is being made.

6. Archive as survival, archive as vulnerability

In 2022, before the war, Aljeally founded the Sudan Art Archive, a digital project of The Muse multi studios aiming to document Sudanese artistic production between 1975 and 2025. It was conceived as a standard art-historical preservation project. After April 2023, it became something else: a refuge for work that no longer had a physical home, and a structural answer to the accelerating destruction of the Sudanese cultural record.³³

The Archive does not operate alone. Sudan Memory, a project launched in 2018 with UK and EU funding, digitises archival collections in collaboration with the National Records Office, the University of Khartoum, and community institutions.³⁴ The Sudanese Archive, launched by the Berlin-based non-profit Mnemonic — whose earlier work produced the Syrian Archive and Yemeni Archive — uses open-source verification methods to preserve user-generated footage documenting human rights violations, with a view to evidentiary use in future accountability processes.³⁵ Sudan Retold, a collaborative platform and publication, narrates Sudanese history through art and oral testimony rather than state records; Rahiem Shadad, founder of the Khartoum Downtown Gallery and now based in Nairobi, co-curated “Sudan Retold Edition 1½” in Doha in 2025.³⁶

Naming the structural vulnerability of these archives is part of the work of reporting on them. Every one of them runs on third-party infrastructure — cloud storage, Instagram, WordPress, Mastodon, Google Workspace — controlled by platform owners operating under their own legal and commercial logics. Instagram has censored Sudanese user content before and will do so again.³⁷ The Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and associated cultural-heritage funding streams in 2025 has hit exactly the kind of small, grassroots Sudanese digital projects that received seed funding from US government development programmes.³⁸ The Cairo-based Emergency Response Committee that coordinates artefact rescue uses Starlink terminals — which is to say it runs on Elon Musk’s tolerance of its existence.³⁹ An archive is only as durable as its most fragile dependency. At the moment, the most fragile dependency is almost always the platform layer.

UNESCO responded to the destruction of the Sudan National Museum by condemning the looting, issuing photographic documentation of 1,700 objects, and training police and customs officers in the region to recognise stolen antiquities. It also deployed the Heritage Emergency Fund. No UNESCO-scale “Save Sudan” campaign comparable to the 1960s Nubian monuments rescue has been mounted. There is no international fund large enough to pay the Sudanese heritage workers who have not been paid in years.⁴⁰

Territorial control in the Sudanese Civil War, August 2025. | Map: ElijahPepe, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

7. What the Western art world is doing, and what it is not

The exhibition record has been better than the political record. Kamala Ibrahim Ishag has had major exhibitions at Sharjah Art Foundation (2016), the Prince Claus Fund (2019), and Serpentine South with the Africa Institute (2022–23).⁴¹ Contemporary Sudanese artists have been shown at Cologne, Lisbon, Madrid, Cairo’s Medrar (Extended Cities, 2025), the Africa Center in New York, and a series of diaspora-led group shows. The Rest Residency (Nairobi, founded by Rahiem Shadad) has provided workspace to displaced Sudanese artists. Individual collectors and foundations have bought.⁴²

What has not happened: no European or North American major museum has, at the time of writing, publicly called on its government to sanction UAE entities involved in financing or arming the RSF. No major European cultural institution has made UAE co-funding conditional on verifiable cessation of RSF support. The UAE continues to fund, through Louvre Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah Art Foundation, a substantial share of the pan-Arab contemporary art economy, including programmes that directly benefit Sudanese artists.⁴³ The art-world relationship with Abu Dhabi is structural, and the museum boards know it.

What this means in practice: Sudanese women artists are being exhibited in Western institutions while the Gulf state most plausibly implicated in the destruction of their working conditions is the same state underwriting the budgets of some of those exhibitions. It is not useful to pretend this contradiction does not exist. It is also not useful to reduce it to a single demand — the artists themselves are divided on what the correct response is, and any call to boycott must be weighed against the cost to artists whose livelihoods depend on exactly these circuits. But the contradiction is there, and the critical function of writing about this work is, at minimum, to name it.

8. Women artists worth following now

For readers who want to move past the summary into specific practices, a short non-exhaustive list — each of these artists is currently active, accessible online, and has work that can be engaged without a museum ticket:

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag — represented by Sharjah Art Foundation; monograph published 2023 by SAF/The Africa Institute/Serpentine/Koenig. Reem Aljeally — sudanartarchive.com, Instagram @reem_aljeally. Alaa Satir — Instagram @alaasatir, currently based in London. Assil Diab (SudaLove) — continuing the Martyrs Graffiti work, documented via @sudalove. Yasmeen Abdullah — based in Muscat. Yasmin Elnour — digital collage, @kandaka.khronicles. Sarah Elawad — sarahelawad.com. Rayan Elnayal — poetry-informed composition, shown via Sudan Art Archive. Alsarah — not a visual artist but a Nubian musician whose work accompanies several of the installations mentioned above.