At the Umoja Art Gallery, an exhibition of works by six contemporary Sudanese artists offers a window into the soul of a nation shaped by both ancient grandeur and modern turmoil. In a city better known for its role as a regional diplomatic hub than as a destination for African contemporary art, Kampala’s Umoja Art Gallery is playing host this month to an exhibition of unusual resonance. Tales of Kush brings together six Sudanese artists living in diaspora across Uganda, Kenya and beyond, presenting work that spans the territories of abstraction, portraiture and social commentary. The show, which opened on May 30 and runs until June 30 2026, is a testament to the vitality of Sudanese visual culture at a moment when the country itself is convulsed by conflict.
The artists
The six artists, Eltayeb Dawelbait, Ameer Yousif, Abushariaa Ahmed, Nursreldin Eldouma, Galal Yousif, and Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Rassoul, are each navigating what it means to make art far from home.
As the curatorial statement puts it, the exhibition explores ‘the lived realities of travel, the sanctity of family, the scars of conflict, and the profound power of acceptance’. The title, evoking the ancient Kingdom of Kush that flourished in the Nile Valley from around 1070 BC, signals an aspiration to connect contemporary experience with a deeper historical consciousness.
This ambition is particularly evident in the work of Nursreldin Eldouma, who contributes seven paintings under the collective title Whisper of the New Flower. His subjects are women, children and the elderly, rendered in warm earth tones and punctuated by vivid yellows drawn from the Ethiopian New Flower that blooms each September.
In Waiting for Deliverance, a young woman in traditional dress meets the viewer with a gaze that carries the weight of displacement: ‘With the arrival of the flames of war in their villages and the shift from calm to fear and anxiety, this expression becomes evident in the girl’s eyes, reflecting what words cannot convey,’ Eldouma explains.
More overtly political is Resisting Unjustice and Circumstances, which depicts a mother carrying both a child and a basket of fruit, a figure burdened but moving forward. Eldouma describes this as a ‘gentle whisper in the ears of government officials and international organisations, urging them to pay attention and care for this marginalised group,’ with particular reference to the impact of climate change on rural communities.
The history
Yet the show’s historical register is never far away. Eldouma’s A Better Tomorrow, featuring a man resting beside a seated camel, deliberately invokes the Kingdom of Kush, a period of artistic flourishing, iron-smelting and the invention of writing that, he suggests, ‘did not completely disappear; rather, it appeared in customs, traditions, beautiful rituals, and boys’ games.’ The painting’s decorative border employs calligraphic forms still found in Sudanese religious schools, particularly in Darfur, creating a visual continuity across millennia.
A very different sensibility governs the work of Mohamed Ahmed Abdel Rassoul. His ink drawings; What Remains 1, 2 and 3, are exercises in line and restraint, figures emerging from a mesh of threads and ropes that manipulate light and shadow with quiet authority. The effect is contemplative, even somber, as though the subjects are being gradually revealed and simultaneously held back.
‘I find that the lines I create have an inherent duty to continuously move and flow without interruptions,’ Rassoul observes, a credo that suits these delicate, melancholic works.
Elsewhere, Ameer Yousif navigates the space between semi-realism and abstraction, drawing on Sudanese cultural symbols to create works that reward sustained looking.
His approach, he says, ‘makes the artist more profound in thinking and extracting the visual inventory that the artist received from contemplation of the culture or cultures that he learnt about.’
The works on display include pieces from his Dialogue series, as well as Sudanese Features, Movement and Strength of a Woman. Abushariaa Ahmed’s contribution is among the most visually exuberant; mixed-media works such as Under the Water, The Revolution and the Migration series combine semi-abstraction with Nubian ornamental motifs and occasional Arabic calligraphy. Galal Yousif, a painter and muralist working across watercolour, acrylic, ink and mixed media, draws inspiration from his childhood village on the Nile.
‘I am inspired by large and small details, the decorations, ornaments, the strong African colours,’ he says.
His works include The Black Stork and the Crises, The Daughter and the Mother and the evocatively titled When Home Is No Longer Home. Perhaps the most materially distinctive voice in the exhibition belongs to Eltayeb Dawelbait, who has lived and worked in Nairobi for 25 years. His practice transforms discarded wood, metal and paper, old doors, kitchen drawers, hinges and plates, into enigmatic three-dimensional portraits that evoke ancient faces and collective memory.
His process of layering colour and then scratching back into the surface to reveal hidden tones is a form of archaeological excavation in miniature. Each of his works, identified by code rather than title, carries the weight of Sudanese heritage rendered in found materials.