Adlan Yousif’s exhibition unfolds like an unsettling walk through a carefully tended war cemetery. Contorted figures, assembled from fragments of scrap metal, stand frozen in silent testimony.
Polished to a muted shine, they still carry the scars of endured pain. These sculpted forms are not merely figures; they are embodiments of war’s aftermath-its senselessness, its banality, and its enduring human cost.
Titled Deprivation, the exhibition at One Off Contemporary Art Gallery is a haunting meditation on the violence of war and the quiet resilience that survives it.
Adlan, a generational talent in metal sculpture, transforms discarded materials into deeply expressive human forms, elevating scrap into vessels of memory and meaning.
Working with iron and reclaimed metal, Adlan reshapes the very materials often used for destruction into symbols of endurance. His sculptures bear the weight of both suffering and survival. They do not simply document loss, they attempt to restore voice to those silenced by conflict.
Adlan’s artistic journey began at the age of seven in Al Fashir, in North Darfur, Sudan, a region long defined by conflict.
‘I grew up in a war zone and saw everything relating to war. All the art you see comes from my own experience,’ he says. ‘My family discovered my talent early and supported me, especially my father. By the time I was 10, people could already recognise faces in my drawings.’
Later, Adlan, like many of his artist peers in the region, went to the Sudan University of Science and Technology College of Fine and Applied Arts, where he specialised in sculpturing. It was here that his fascination with metal deepened, not as a tool of destruction, but as a medium of transformation.
‘I use metal because I’ve seen it destroy cities during war. I wanted to use that art to give the metal a soul, and to tell stories with it. I don’t usually wear gloves when I work because I want to feel and connect with the material.’
In that connection, Adlan says it has become cleat that the materials carry their own history of corrosion and conflict, and through them he explore how the spirit is marked by exile, how home becomes a dream, and how that dream becomes something carried on one’s shoulders.
His relocation to Nairobi, he says, came as a result of the war in his homeland where violence had spilled over.
‘I came to Nairobi because the war left me no other choice. What is happening in Sudan today is a long-standing extension of unresolved crises: a struggle for power, the militarisation of the State, the marginalisation of entire regions, and the collapse of the political process. The current war broke out due to an armed conflict between military forces within the State, but its real victims are civilians,’ he says.
Deprivation built up from his last show, Between Exiless, staged last year. It focused on the violence meted against women and children by the war.
‘In this show, my work was to represent human suffering and struggle, and the people affected by war because I have grown up in a war zone. I titled it Deprivation because during the war, they lock up cities, so there is no food or medicine, and people die because of disease and hunger. Militants separate children from their parents. Children and women die for nothing. Sexual violence is meted as a tool of punishment. Deprivation signifies deprivation from education, from food, from healthcare, all because of war,’ he says.
Before the show, Adlan revisited disturbing images from the ongoing conflict, an emotionally taxing process that shaped some of his most powerful pieces. One of the largest works features burnt dolls and children’s toys fused onto canvas and darkened with charred paint.
‘I saw a video of a burned house with toys scattered in the debris. I kept asking myself, where are the children? Sometimes, burnt toys are the only evidence that they existed.’
The exhibition is also deeply personal. In November last year, Adlan lost his mother to the war, an event that nearly halted his work. Instead, grief became fuel.
‘For two months, I couldn’t work. The stress and pain affected me physically. But eventually, that grief shaped the pieces. I have lost many friends and relatives. Some died trying to cross borders, even the Red Sea on their way to Europe in search of safety.’
Of his subjects in the show, he says, ‘My characters are neither heroes nor victims, they are travellers on an unfinished journey, bodies bent with exhaustion but still standing.’