Sudan's art scene has been on the rise for years, and then a war broke out and scattered the people who were building it. But the work didn't stop. If anything, it became more urgent. The artists below are the ones who were making things before the war gave them something bigger to say — and have kept making things since. Some are in Nairobi, some in Cairo, some in London. None of them stopped.

Waleed was born in 2000 in Khartoum and graduated from the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at Sudan University of Science and Technology. His practice sits at the intersection of painting and mixed media — he reconstructs archival imagery and personal histories, often weaving in cotton yarn as a material stand-in for something harder to name: fragmentation, erasure, the act of holding things together when they keep coming apart.

His work is about identity and memory, but not in the abstract way those words usually get used. It is specific. It is Sudanese heritage meeting the reality of displacement, and what that collision actually looks like on a canvas.

Galal works across everything — watercolour, acrylic, ink, mixed media with wood and metal — from sketchbook to 30-foot wall. During the 2019 revolution, his murals spread across Khartoum and made him one of the most recognisable artists of that moment.

Since moving to Nairobi in 2023, he has been making his Forgotten Crisis series: ink drawings of displaced people moving across the page, their colour fading as they recede into the distance. He made these to raise awareness about a crisis he feared the world was actively choosing not to see.

Amna works across painting, printmaking, installation, and sound — and her subject is women and children in her community: their bodies, their games, the physical and spiritual transformations they move through.

There is something remarkably precise about the way she approaches these themes: the female body in public and in private, and the ways children’s play mirrors the world around them. Her 2024 solo exhibition, Things I Knew When I Was Young, delves deeper into the latter thread, exploring toys, movement, and the sensory experience of childhood as a distinct form of knowledge.

Rayan's digital works imagine Sudanese spaces that don't follow the laws of physics — traditional courtyard homes floating in axonometric views, shadows and reflections distorted, time bent. The question underneath all of it is: why does futurism have to look the way it does?

Her latest solo exhibit features two series: floating segments of a traditional Sudanese home, and a more abstract version of the same spaces where everything — light, reflection, scale — starts to come apart. She uses 3D modelling and digital collaging to build these projections, and the result is something that feels both ancient and completely unreal. The work isn't nostalgic. It is speculative. What does it look like when Sudanese heritage gets to imagine its own future, on its own terms, without having to justify itself against a Eurocentric default?