Narrating Our Own story: Art lovers Take A stand

Agencies – Sudan Events

Report

Afraa Ahmed left with nothing. When the Sudanese artist fled her home in Khartoum, the country’s capital, in late April, bombs were already falling on her neighborhood. There wasn’t time to pack a suitcase, let alone make a plan for the dozens of paintings and ceramics she had scattered across her home and throughout the city’s galleries.

“I live for my art and I live by it,” she says of her life before a war that unexpectedly cleaved apart the lives of millions of Sudanese. Now, she can’t bear to paint. And even if she could, who would buy art in a time like this? “We all live every day in anxiety, tension, and fear,” she says from near the northern Sudanese city of Shendi, where she has temporarily found refuge.

Creativity can be used to tell important stories in critical moments of history. Art lovers are fundraising to help Sudanese artists, uprooted and thrown into crisis by the war.

For Rahiem Shadad, a curator whose Khartoum-based space, Downtown Gallery, once displayed Ms. Ahmed’s works, such stories cut especially deep. “We formed to display the revolution’s art,” he says, referring to the 2019 movement that overthrew the three-decade dictatorship of former President Omar al-Bashir. “Since then, many of our artists have been able to completely devote their life to their art” for the first time, he says.

But the overthrow of Mr. Bashir’s authoritarian rule was followed by more than three years of political upheaval, which culminated in the fighting that began in April between Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary force, both vying for political control.
To date, Sponsor a Sudanese Artist has collected more than $12,000, nearly all of which has already been dispersed to local artists, mostly via small grants of $100 to $500.

For now, the organizers say, people’s needs have largely been similar to those of Ms. Ahmed, who asked for help getting her family out of the path of bullets. But already, Sudan’s artists are beginning to express what they’re going through in their art.

Five hundred miles northeast of Khartoum, in Port Sudan, a collective of artists has begun organizing public art projects in which people can paint and listen to music to relieve stress.