Sudan: Waleed Mohammed - Using Art to Preserve Sudan's Collective Memory

What the report says

Sudanese visual artist Waleed Mohammed is using painting and mixed media to preserve and rethink Sudan’s collective memory, according to a report from Dabanga published by AllAfrica. Working from his studio in Nairobi, Kenya, he draws on old photographs, family albums, studio portraits and archival images by Sudanese photographers such as Rashid Mahdi and Gadalla Gubara. His work reflects both Sudan’s cultural history and the personal rupture caused by war, displacement and the scattering of his family.

The article says Mohammed graduated in fine art shortly before the war in Sudan began in April 2023, then left the country and continued his practice abroad. In Nairobi, he has produced works that revisit memories of home, family and social life before the conflict, while also responding to the upheaval of life during and after displacement. His paintings combine monochrome figures, vivid backgrounds, embroidery, Arabic calligraphy, cotton and other materials to suggest fading memory, absence and erasure.

Several pieces are described as especially personal, including a painting titled Awab, named after his nephew now in Libya, and a portrait of his mother made in Kampala. Another series, Spaces of Escape, addresses forced migration and fragmentation. The report also places his work in the context of postmemory, a term used in scholarship to describe how later generations inherit the aftereffects of trauma through images and stories. In Mohammed’s case, the article notes that he is not only inheriting memory but living through the conflict himself, which gives his art a direct social and historical urgency.