Sudan Retold book and art exhibition launched at Alhosh Gallery

The “Sudan Retold Edition 1½”, a compelling exploration of Sudanese cultural wealth and intellectual achievement, was launched Friday at Alhosh Gallery at The Pearl Island.

The event featured a book launch and an accompanying art exhibition, immersing attendees in photography, paintings, and multimedia installations that bring Sudan’s creative stories into dialogue with themes of memory, space, and community.

Curated by Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) Artist-in-Residence Khalid Albaih, alongside Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann and Abdelrahiem (Rahiem) Shadad, the project invites audiences to engage with Sudanese narratives beyond dominant political or historical frameworks, opening a space for alternative voices, layered interpretations, and artistic testimony.

The initiative is part of the “Seeing Sudan: Politics Through Art” conference, a three-day event that began on September 18 at the Four Seasons Doha.

It also forms part of a long-term project, now more than a decade in the making, that unites Sudanese artists, writers, curators, and cultural workers responding to a country often reduced to a single narrative despite its diverse cultures, religions, languages, and histories.

Edited by Albaih, Fuhrmann, and Suzi Mirghani, the second volume of “Sudan Retold” was developed amid Sudan’s fragile transitional period: from the revolution, to renewed repression, to the 2021 military coup.

With many contributors now displaced by ongoing conflict, the work resonates across geographies, weaving fiction, personal memory, archival fragments, and visual storytelling.

The curators noted that the book and exhibition “are not historical overviews. They are fragments, fictions, testimonies, and visual narratives. They draw on personal archives, oral histories, forgotten objects, and speculative figures – not to reconstruct a singular past, but to open space tor layered, plural understandings of Sudan”.

Among the featured works is *The Khartoum School by Ayat R H Ahmed, highlighting the influential Sudanese modern art movement shaped by artists such as Ahmed Shibrain, Ibrahim El Salahi, and Kamala Ishag.

El Salahi, who once studied art in London, fused Western influences with Sudanese traditions to create a distinctive style that redefined audiences’ perceptions of modern African art.

Also showcased is *Echoes of the Studio: Faces from the Archive by Waleed Mohammad, which reimagines mid-20th-century Sudanese studio portraits and family photographs, offering a meditation on continuity, change, and loss across generations.

Another installation revisits “The Neighbourhood Association”, a tradition dating back to 1990 in Khartoum’s Burri district, where women organised collective support for community events, embodying enduring practices of solidarity.

The exhibition also features *An Ode from the Diaspora, a series of illustrated poems that narrate fictional conversations between Sudanese creatives wrestling with self-doubt on the eve of the 2019 revolution – an exploration of art’s power to inspire change.