On the morning that Sudan’s rival forces began fighting, Yasir Algrai was in his studio in the center of the country’s capital preparing for another day of work surrounded by paints and canvases.
That was on April 15 – and for the three days that followed, Mr Algrai was trapped in his studio, starving and dehydrated as fighting raged on the streets of Khartoum on his doorstep.
Hours a day he shrank in terror as bullets pierced the building’s windows and the walls shook from errant shelling. When a brief period of silence for escape came, Mr. Algrai was eager to seize it – albeit with a heavy heart.
“I couldn’t carry any of my art or personal belongings,” said Mr Algrai, 29, who got out but left behind his favorite guitar and more than 300 paintings of various sizes. “This conflict has robbed us of our art and our peace, and we must now try to stay sane in the midst of displacement and death.”
A dozen Sudanese artists and curators in Sudan, Egypt and Kenya told DailyExpertNews they had no idea about the fate of their homes, studios or gallery spaces, which cumulatively housed works worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“The artistic, creative ecosystem will break down for a while,” said Azza Satti, a Sudanese art curator and filmmaker. Artists, she said, “saw the need of the people to express themselves, to feel alive, to feel acknowledged,” adding that the war gradually led to “the erasing of that voice, that identity.”
Some of the capital’s fiercest fighting took place in neighborhoods like Khartoum 2, which is home to the city’s newest art galleries, or bustling neighborhoods like Souk al-Arabi, where Mr. Algrai had his studio. Robberies and looting are rife in those areas, with residents blaming the paramilitary forces that have steadily tightened their grip on the capital.
With museums and historic buildings attacked and damaged in the fighting, many are also concerned about the looting of the country’s artistic resources and archaeological sites.
The Sudan Natural History Museum and the archives of Omdurman Ahlia University have both suffered significant damage or looting, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said in a statement.
“Within the war, the physical war, there is another war for art,” said Eltayeb Dawelbait, a seasoned Sudanese artist living in Nairobi. Mr Dawelbait has several pieces in Sudanese galleries and said he feared Sudan’s artistic and cultural institutions would be stolen, just as happened in Iraq two decades ago.
“The artwork must be protected,” he said.
After the country’s independence in 1956 from the United Kingdom and Egypt, Sudan had a vibrant art scene that spawned famous artists, including Ahmed Shibrain, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and Kamala Ibrahim Ishag. But in the three decades that dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir ruled, he used censorship, religious decrees and imprisonment to curb creative expression, forcing many artists and musicians to flee the country.
That began to shift during the 2019 revolution, when young artists poured into the streets to paint murals on walls and roads and call for democratic rule. When Mr. al-Bashir was finally removed from power in April of that year, artists enjoyed their newfound freedoms and began painting and sculpting to document life in post-revolution Sudan.
Among them was Dahlia Abdelilah Baasher, a 32-year-old self-taught artist who quit her job as an art teacher after the revolution to devote herself full-time to her art. Ms. Baasher’s figurative paintings explore the repression faced by women in Sudanese society, and over the years her works have attracted the attention of curators and art custodians from Sudan, Egypt, Kenya and the United States.
Days before the Sudanese war broke out in April, she and her family went to Egypt for the last days of the holy month of Ramadan and the subsequent Eid holiday. Mrs. Baasher packed several small paintings for the trip, hoping to sell them, but left more than two dozen large canvases at home.
“I cannot put into words or put on canvas how I feel about this war,” Ms Baasher said in a video interview from Cairo. With her apartment building and neighborhood in Khartoum abandoned, she said she did not know the fate of her belongings.
“We’re all just shocked and traumatized,” she said. “We never thought this would happen and that we would lose the art movement that we built.”
Mr. Shadad, 27, works with more than 60 artists across Sudan and planned a solo exhibition in Khartoum for Waleed Mohamed, a 23-year-old painter. Mr. Shadad had also just finished curating and shipping artwork for an exhibition scheduled to travel abroad entitled “Disturbance in The Nile”. The show, which starts at the end of June, will tour Lisbon, Madrid and Paris, showcasing Sudanese artists of different generations.
But since fighting broke out, Mr Shadad has focused solely on ensuring the safety of the artists and their artworks.
Hundreds of paintings and framed artworks are trapped in the Downtown Gallery in Khartoum 2. The conflict has also depleted many artists’ savings and denied them a regular income, largely derived from sales to foreigners and embassy officials who have now been evacuated. .
To help artists and their families, Mr. Shadad launched a crowdfunding campaign this month along with Sudanese curators such as Ms. Satti. They are also thinking about how to bring artists’ works to safety once relative peace is restored in Khartoum. Despite a seven-day ceasefire that expires on Monday, Mr Shadad said he had been told of raids and harassment of civilians who retreated to the area near his gallery.
“The center of the art scene in Sudan is under serious attack,” Mr Shadad said tearfully in a telephone interview from Cairo. “It’s extremely emotional to think that the hard work we’ve put in just goes to waste.”
For many artists, the conflict has also denied them access to their source of inspiration.
Khalid Abdel Rahman, whose work depicts landscapes of Khartoum neighborhoods and Sufi tombs, fled his Khartoum 3 studio without his paintings and says he has been thinking about how the conflict will affect his vision and future creations.
“I can’t figure it out right now,” he said. “I’m really sad about this.”
But amid the death and displacement enveloping Sudan, artists say this is a new period in the country’s history that they will have to somehow document.
“This is an era that we must study carefully so that we can pass it on to future generations and show them what has happened to the land,” said Mr Algrai, who lives in a village east of Khartoum.
“The passion will never die.”