Gazes and voices

Photography in present day Sudan has become a means of activism and war documentation and is a vital force in shaping Sudan’s national identities. Despite political censorship, economic hardships and armed conflict, Sudanese photographers continue to tell their country’s stories, thereby ensuring that personal stories and history are preserved through the power of the image.

A selection of images and thoughts by contemporary Sudanese photographers on the impact of war and displacement in Sudan. Curated by Ala Kheir.

Copyright for the texts and photographs are with the authors.

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The war in Khartoum and Omdurman has drastically reshaped life in the city. Islam Bushra, a documentary photographer based in Khartoum, found himself caught in the middle of the conflict. Torn between the decision to stay or leave, Islam like many young people his age began finding ways to support his community while also trying to sustain his own family. He continued to document everyday life around him in Omdurman, capturing the resilience and struggles of those who remained. In 2024, he ultimately made the difficult decision to leave Sudan in search of a safer and more hopeful future.

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When the war erupted in April 2023, Mosab and his family were displaced by front‑line fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces, forcing them out of their home in eastern Omdurman. Spending two years not far from the front line, Mosab’s photo project “Tadween” is a documentation of life in war, exploring how people adapt and coexist amid conflict and examining how war has affected their way of life. Mosab’s photographs are an interpretation of everyday challenges, complex emotions and encounters in everyday Omdurman from the beginning of the war.

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Amar was forced to leave his home, beginning a difficult journey that took him first to Egypt, then to Uganda. Throughout this time, he remained committed to his photography, using his camera to document not only the landscapes he passed through but also the emotions, resilience, and daily realities of those caught in between borders. This collection reflects a personal and collective story of exile, identity, and longing for home. In 2024, Amar returned to Sudan, driven by a deep connection to his homeland and a desire to continue telling the story of his people from within.

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In fall 2022, I made up my mind, that I would save enough money to travel around my country by the next one, I, a backpack and my camera in my hand. I did not know how until the outbreak of war in the center Khartoum, in the year 2023, took me from my home to the far north, the Sudanese, Egyptian borders, and back to Berber. A journey of displacement mixed with the beauty of my country’s cultures, and the fabric of my homeland society that contained suffering.

The pictures were taken in Al-Ubyyad – Western Sudan, Kassala – Eastern Sudan, Berber – Northern Sudan.

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The poet Ishraga Mustafa, translator of the website texts into Arabic, was inspired by this work to write the following text.

Memory for the future

Why did it take so long to translate the texts of this project into Arabic? From the very first word, the fragments of a painful memory would not let me go – while I tried to reconcile myself with the suffering of my own personal memory. A memory that is inextricably linked to the collective memory: the memory of Sudanese women and men who have been forgotten in our history books, our stories, songs, chants and children’s riddles.

In my childhood, I longed for stories like the ones our neighbor Uncle Al-Zubair Khamis told me – about Um Haitan mountain, about all the Nuba mountains. I no longer remember all the details, but the memory of the mountains – doves of peace fluttering in his heart – remained vivid in my memory. It continues to beat, despite the deep wounds of painful experiences.

These riddles filled my childish imagination with ashes, with forgotten embers that testify to an awakening consciousness and to the questions of spiritual confrontation. His tales of names, derived from mountains, trees and rain, echoed into my exile – touching me with the melody of forgotten stories which found no place in school books, on the radio and on television and in our everyday tales.

We were separated from each other by lines of fire that we were not allowed to cross. I longed to understand other languages – like the ones that made the face of Uncle Al-Zubair’s sister, Aunt Kani, light up when she spoke to him. I awaited her arrival with an anticipation that matched her powerful presence, often coming laden with delicacies from the mountains.

I grew, and with me grew the exile within me. An exile that prepared me for the great exile – an exile that is not bound to a place, but is an emotional state that has accompanied me since my time in Kosti, Sudan. I was traveling in the worlds of the moon on nights when he once told me, “You have something of Mendy in you.” I didn’t know her, but with the memory came back the erased land. I thought it was one of the beautiful legends he told me every time I ran to him with my small, malaria-weakened body as soon as he returned home with his sickle from the gardens of Kosti.

The full moon, accompanied by the stories of the forgotten.

Mendy is my soulmate in questions about the power of memory and the memory of power not written about in school history books. The stories that cloud consciousness because stories that are not written by everyone are hidden stories of reality and truth. And the truth has many faces, as diverse as Sudan itself.

The knowledge I have acquired on my long path of critical awareness, since the first book I read, and my mental openness to the Other in different worlds – and what a great pain it is to recognize that there is an oppressed Other! And not to raise my voice too loudly in the face of Mendy’s great courage in resisting the British colonial power that continues to persist in a place that is changing like power in Sudan – power of language, religion, color, ethnicity and gender.

All of this was sparked by the whirlwinds of history and narratives that were both my companions and torments in the winter nights of Vienna – winter is a mirror against forgetting. Three projects were like pouring oil on the fire – a fire that burns and warms in the cold nights full of questions.

The first project was the translation for this website about a story that is anchored in my memory – a forgotten story of which I have only learned little and hazily about concealed crimes in our political history: The story of the Nuba Mountains in the context of Leni Riefenstahl’s travels and photographs. This coincided with a project of the Brunnenpassage in Vienna to participate in an anthology entitled “Memory in the Future”, on the occasion of the discovery of a bunker from the Second World War. The thoughts and questions exhausted my mind and heart. I felt drained, as if I alone carried the mountains of memory, remembrance and pain. So is it a coincidence that the third project – a conference organized by the Friedensbüro in Salzburg – is dedicated to the topic “Getting out of exhaustion”?

Mental and spiritual exhaustion weighed heavily on my shoulders, wrinkles spread across my forehead and pain in my neck accompanied me. But my eyes sparkled with determination. It is a luxury to give in to my exhaustion while there are countries burning, their wars forgotten in European media politics!

I often had to take a break from translating. The memories and the silence of the stories pained me, drove me to flare up images of great agony in my memory. When I was a child, my teacher at elementary school told me not to ask such questions – questions about Koko, the boy who carries the buckets of human waste: what a shame! Why wasn’t he in class at the neighboring school with my younger brother?

What kept Abio from going to school, even though classes were free back then? Why did everyone turn against her, the local alcohol seller from South Sudan? Especially after 1983, when the dictator Gaafar Nimeiri enacted the so-called Islamic Sharia laws. She laughed at us and said: “Al-Mreisa is food and medicine against malaria and many other diseases, and it cannot be compared to Coca-Cola.” As I grew older, I understood the deeper meaning of her words – the comparison between locally produced products and imported or even local Coca-Cola and the political interests behind it.

How often I used to sneak into the dance ground behind the small market as a child! There I would watch the feet of the beautiful Dinka dancers who seemed to leap up to the sky, while in my heart the dust of life swirled into joy and love. Years later, as my youth took shape, my own feet lost the rhythm of the Karang and Nagāra dances that Yūsuf Al-Zubair Khamis – my milk brother – had taught me. He would accompany me to the dance grounds every Friday afternoon; carved into these steps was my path to consciousness and a struggle that was initially directed against the self, before transitioning into the spirit of collective resistance – a resistance against the abyss of concealed history.

The deeper I delve into the translation, the more fiercely the memory flares up. And this memory must be written down so that the future has a glorious memory – one that corresponds to the dignity of the human being and restores appreciation to all those forgotten: those who lost their lives, those who hid in mountain caves while military planes bombed life, people, above them.

On my translation journey, I made invisible journeys to the villages and regions in the mountains – those mountains about which someone once asked me: “Which mountains do you belong to?” He was convinced that I was from the Nuba Mountains – because of the projects we had realized together with Mendy to restore the dignity of Princess Mendy, daughter of Sultan Ajabna. Mendy, the fearless one who was wiped out by history. Is a monument enough for her? She deserves to be known to the whole world – she is my talisman with whom I sleep and wake up. She should be a symbol for all those forgotten women who have played a major role in history – women about whom the selective memory of power remains silent.

Another journey took me to some of Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs, pictures of little girls. At that moment, all I could think of was the beauty of the ebony trees reflected in their delicate bodies. But what was Leni Riefenstahl thinking when she photographed their nudity? Was it really her body – or was it the nudity of a history that denied many regions in Sudan development, education, health and political participation? Was it their nakedness – or the nakedness of the privileges of others who had access to education? Education is a human right for all.

But what power determined the politics of “Arabization” and “Islamization” – a politics that banned our songs and languages, even though they shaped the first identities of Sudanese women and men? The power of skin color was reflected in racist structures – starting with the state and extending deep into society. Has anything changed after the outbreak of war in Sudan on April 15, 2023 – after the displacement, after our confrontation with the question of skin color? Wounds that reveal themselves in consciousness – and the realization that ultimately it is only colorism: of skin color, like the power of social class.

This project is inspiring. It would be even more inspiring if – as some would like – compensation were paid from Leni Riefenstahl’s fortune, a legitimate right, because part of this fortune has its roots in their rituals, trees and mountains. A just project for history, a collective and not a one-sided history.

The participation of a diverse team from the mountains of Nuba, inside and outside Sudan, reflects the creative consciousness of the German museum and the belief in the implementation of rights systems, the right of others to write about their history, their critical issues and the desire to work together to redress a phase of memory for the future.

I know that my participation in this translation project is no coincidence. I did not translate alone, I was accompanied by a history full of beauty and a memory full of fertility – and the child I was, cared for by neighbors like Aunt Hawliya Al-Awad, mother of my milk brother Yūsuf Al-Zubair Khamis, of Aunt Kani: whom I only realized in adulthood were not my mother’s sisters. And I was accompanied by the growing awareness of the Other in a memory that I have saved for the future to write about: the aunts Kaka, Kaltusha, Hawa and my childhood companions, when we were still playing innocently before the Force set our paths before us. But the burning paths of consciousness remained most resilient in the face of racism, its recognition and the fight against it.

My participation in this project is not accidental … I am one of Mendy’s “granddaughters” and daughter of those mountains that I long to visit one day, to walk the paths of those forgotten by power – a power that can be exposed by the pen, for a future memory in the grace of Mendy! There remains only one longing, one wish: to erect a monument to Princess Mendy bint Sultan Ajabna, the courageous woman, as part of this project – a worthy sign of remembrance for the future.

Ishraga Mustafa Hamed
Vienna, June 19, 2025