Agitation on the Nile: Modern and Contemporary Art from Sudan is the title of the exhibition which will open this afternoon at 7 p.m. at Casa Árabe in Madrid, together with a round table discussion with the curator of the exhibition, Rahiem Shadad, and three of the artists taking part in it, Rashid Diab, Eltayeb Dawelbait and Bakri Moaz. The other participating artists are Mohammed A. Otaybi, Tariq Nasre, Sannad Shreef, Yasmeen Abdullah, Hassan Kamil, Miska Mohmmed, Reem Al Jeally and Waleed Mohammed. Free admission until full capacity is reached. In Spanish and Arabic with simultaneous interpretation.
After the popular uprising that led to the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019, Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, saw the number of galleries promoting the work of Sudanese artists multiply, and pop-up art proliferated throughout the country. The amazing murals of the revolution were part of a short-lived effervescence that ended bitterly with the outbreak of another war on 15 April 2023. A conflict that, to date, has resulted in the mass displacement and uncertainty of more than 10.5 million Sudanese.
The exhibition Upheaval on the Nile lives up to its name. The works gathered in this exhibition left Sudan days before the current turbulence and have found refuge in southern Europe, first Lisbon and now Madrid. The exhibition represents an effort to affirm that even when lives and homes are torn from a community, the collective voice and expression of a people cannot be silenced.
The lack of knowledge of what is happening in this unique country, the nation of the two Niles, represents an opportunity to take a journey through modern and contemporary art through the work of eleven Sudanese artists, most of them from Khartoum.
