(Re)Collecting Sudan: Art and Culture Archives Workshop I
On April 11-12, 2025, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) held the first research workshop under its research initiative on Sudan. The workshop titled “(Re)Collecting Sudan: Art and Culture Archives” examined the intersection of cultural expression and conflict, conducting a broad and in-depth survey of art and culture archives in all their forms. The purpose of the two-day meeting was to discuss and provide feedback on a collection of draft proposals submitted for the project.
The discussion started with a look at “Accidental Archiving,” which was a key topic examining how Sudanese artistic practices inadvertently created valuable archives during conflict. Reem Aljeally and Katarzyna Grabska reflected on their collaborative efforts to document Sudanese art using informal digital tools like social media, workshops, and project websites. These spontaneous archives, forged out of necessity amid war, become vital repositories of memory and collective experience. The discussion emphasized challenges around archive ownership, purpose, and accessibility during crises when traditional archiving is disrupted, highlighting the profound role of improvisation in cultural preservation.
Suha Hasan’s session explored how fragmented archives sustain collective memory, despite upheaval and destruction. Focusing on archives dispersed across multiple countries near the Nile Confluence, she portrayed archives as dynamic, interlinked spaces enabling continuous reinterpretation of Sudan’s history and identity. She highlighted the archives’ non-neutrality, shaped by institutional and cultural norms, and described how seemingly small artifacts, like postcards, unlock broader narratives about Sudanese architectural heritage and debates over cultural repatriation.
Next, Eiman Hussein and Erica Carter’s project (co-authored with Talal Afifi) is a collective auto-ethnographic study of Sudanese artist Hussein Shariffe’s archives. Their research illuminates how archival encounters foster dialogue and meaning-making during cultural crises. Through recorded conversations and thematic analysis, they explored how proximity and distance influence archiving processes and storytelling. This work underscores archives as relational sites that enable collaborative worldbuilding and ethical stewardship of personal collections.
Salma Amin analyzed the evolution of Sudanese archival practices amid turmoil, focusing on the digital platform Andariya, launched in 2015, and cofounded with Omia Shawkat. Andariya serves as a crucial space for documenting and engaging with Sudanese culture online and offline, adjusting to censorship, violence, and displacement. Amin emphasized grassroots-led digital archiving as essential for preserving collective memory, while addressing challenges like data security, sustainability, and potential misrepresentation. Her insights reveal the complex interplay between technology, community effort, and archival resilience in unstable contexts.
In the next session, Larrisa-Diana Furhmann explored how Sudanese artists deploy Instagram as an active archive to preserve personal narratives and to counter state narratives. She examined the tensions between creative freedom, platform politics, censorship, and algorithmic limitations. Using visual and content analysis alongside digital ethnography and interviews, her research reveals Instagram as a site of resistance and collective memory-building under political repression. This study highlights the emerging role of social media in documenting history and fostering political participation in Sudan.
The discussion then shifted to Sudanese heritage preservation and archiving in light of institutional decline and ongoing conflict. Bentley Brown and Haneen Sidahmed focused on Sudanese heritage preservation by communities amidst institutional collapse and conflict, emphasizing oral traditions and diaspora participation. They explored “affective archiving,” where memory is tied to emotion and displacement, with diaspora communities building decentralized, DIY archives, particularly online. Their work uses interviews and video documentation to understand how Sudanese music, stories, and lived experiences create meaningful heritage. Their research underscores community agency as fundamental to cultural survival in fragmented contexts.
Next, Ahmad Sikainga examined Khartoum’s vibrant popular culture across the twentieth century, concentrating on music, dance, fashion, and sports. Utilizing colonial records, oral histories, and photographs, he analyzed how ethnicity, identity, and conflict influenced urban social life in northern Sudan. This work sheds light on the interplay between cultural expression and sociopolitical dynamics, enriching understandings of Sudan’s evolving urban identity during the colonial and post-colonial periods.
Marilyn Deegan and Wahbi Abdulrahman highlighted the Sudan Memory project’s transformative work since 2013 to digitize and safeguard endangered Sudanese cultural heritage. The initiative installed digitization equipment nationwide, including at Nile Valley University, to preserve manuscripts, photographs, films, and artifacts. Despite challenges, the project trained hundreds of people, captured around 300,000 images, and launched a robust online archive. Sudan Memory now functions as a crucial cultural lifeline, reinforcing cultural memory’s role in Sudanese national identity.
Continuing the conversation on Sudan Memory, Qutouf Elobaid and Rund Al Arabi represented the Locale collective, and shed light on a project that critically engages with the digitized archives of Sudan Memory to challenge dominant historical narratives and foreground overlooked Sudanese histories. Their project examined themes like colonial legacies, love histories, design-politics intersections, and industrial impacts. By analyzing diverse archival materials, the initiative advocates for archives as active sites of research, uncovering marginalized voices and questioning post-colonial identity constructs. Their work expands Sudanese historiography, fostering scholarly and public reinterpretations that invigorate Sudan’s cultural and historical discourse.
Ala Kheir then explored photography’s vital role in documenting Sudan’s recent social and political unrest. He traced photography’s evolution from the colonial era to digital times, emphasizing both professional and amateur photographers’ contributions to narratives of resistance. He discussed challenges such as censorship and personal risk, alongside new opportunities from citizen journalism through technology. His research combines interviews and social media analysis to highlight photography’s impact on public opinion, policy, and collective memory, advocating for building a comprehensive photographic archive to preserve Sudan’s contemporary history.
Rahiem Shadad examined Sudanese cultural policies during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on Maslahat Althaqafa, an institution founded in 1971 to promote diverse artistic expressions beyond dominant Arab-Islamic narratives. His work assessed how Maslahat Althaqafa fostered inclusivity and shaped a broad national identity through a variety of programs. Using archival research, oral histories, and interviews, his work sheds light on this often-overlooked period of cultural policymaking, offering insights for current debates on cultural identity and policy in Sudan.
In the next session, Ruba El Malik and Reem Abbas discussed how Sudanese women have utilized fashion, poetry, and “girls’ songs” (aghani banat) to document sociopolitical events in Sudan, particularly in the face of the destruction of national archives and arts infrastructure by the Islamist regime. They outlined women’s roles as historians and archivists through their daily communications and dress, preserving cultural heritage by reflecting on social issues, personal experiences, and their position in Sudanese society. The authors highlighted Sudanese cloth (toub) from different political eras, pictures, music, and poetry to showcase how women have organically built an archive through their approach to daily life, emphasizing the resilience and dynamism of Sudanese women’s historicizing efforts.
Representing Sudan Living Heritage (SSLH) project and co-authors Zainab Gaafar and Helen Mallinson, Amna Elidrissy emphasized the interplay between traditional heritage transmission and contemporary archiving in Sudan during both peaceful and turbulent times. Highlighting projects like the Western Sudan Community Museum and the SSLH online platform, she discussed evolving museums into participatory community spaces that support continuous cultural transmission. These efforts adapt heritage preservation to transmission through modern communication technologies, ensuring cultural heritage remains a lived, evolving practice rather than a static relic, vital for resilience amid challenges like modernization and conflict.
The last session focused on the experiences of Sudanese migrant workers in Beirut, Lebanon, from the 1950s to the present. Anna Reumert looked at how these migrants have been excluded from official historical narratives despite their significant contributions to Lebanese society. Through oral histories, personal archives, and independent films, she explained how these migrants have created a parallel to Lebanese public memory, documenting Sudanese migrant lives and participating in transregional political solidarity. Her work examines the evolution of Sudanese migrant political communities, their engagement with pan-Africanist and anticolonial struggles, and the impact of Sudan’s political shifts, including the December 2018 revolution and ongoing war, on their sense of exile and prospects for return.
- To view the working group agenda, click here
- To read the participants’ biographies, click here
- Read more about this research initiative
Participants and Discussants:
- Reem Abbas, Independent Researcher
- Wahbi Abdulrahman, Nile Valley University, Sudan
- Ahmed Abushouk, Qatar University
- Ayah Ahmed, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Rund Alarabi, The Städelschule (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), Germany
- Sara Al-Attiyah, Qatar Museums
- Khalid Albaih, Artist in Residence, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Muez Ali, Earthna: Center for a Sustainable Future at Qatar Foundation
- Reem Aljeally, Ubuntu Art Gallery, Egypt
- Salma Amin, Andariya
- Zahra Babar, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Misba Bhatti, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Bentley Brown, American University of Sharjah
- Erica Carter, King’s College
- Marilyn Deegan, King’s College
- Ola Diab, 500 Words Magazine
- Amna Elidrissy, Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heristage (SSLH)
- Ruba El Melik, Independent Researcher
- Qutouf Elobaid, Locale
- Noon Elsherif, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Larissa-Diana Fuhrmann, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt
- Zainab Gaafar, Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heristage (SSLH)
- Katarzyna Grabska, University of Geneva
- Suha Hasan, Mawane
- Aya Hassan, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Noor Hussain, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Eiman Hussein, King’s College
- Lynda Iroulo, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Ala Kheir, Independent Researcher
- Dale Menezes,Georgetown University in Qatar
- Suzi Mirgani, CIRS, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Anna Simone Ruemert, The New School, US
- Nadya Sbaiti, Georgetown University in Qatar
- Rahiem Shadad, Downtown Gallery
- Omnia Shawkat, Andariya
- Haneen Sidhahmed, Sudan Tapes Archive
- Ahmad Sikainga, Ohio State University
Article by CIRS Research Analyst Misba Bhatti