In ‘Resistance in Memory,’ Sudanese Photographers Bring Critical Visibility to a ‘Forgotten War’

In 2019, a revolution fueled by deep-seated discontent precipitated a coup to remove then-president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. Then in 2021, the military led another coup to take control of the government. In April 2023, all-out civil war erupted between rival military groups who sought to control the government: the country’s armed forces and a paramilitary group called Rapid Support Forces (RSF). All results of decades of tensions, the evolving and disastrous struggle continues today.

The conflict has also led to a terrific humanitarian crisis. Despite mounting casualties, millions living in famine regions, and nearly a third of the country’s population displaced from their homes, international media focus has predominantly been elsewhere. In his article for TIME, showcasing the photographs of Moises Saman, Charlie Campbell calls the crisis a “forgotten war.”

Photographers are our eyes on the ground in Sudan, providing glimpses of the realities of war, displacement, hunger—and hope—in this war-torn nation. Information is tightly controlled and the press heavily censored, which translates to very little insight into events. But images give the crisis much-needed visibility. With this in mind, The Africa Center brings together the work of 12 emerging, independent Sudanese photographers in the group exhibition Resistance in Memory: Visions of Sudan.

Reflections of compassion, love, joy, and humanity ring through the show’s 42 poignant photos, which range from black-and-white landscapes to documentary imagery to portraits. Six of the 12 artists included in the show still reside in the country, sharing personal experiences and observations throughout the last few years.

A statement says, “Resistance in Memory: Visions of Sudan examines the memory of an ever-changing Sudan and the strength and resilience of its people who refuse to be forgotten or defined by those beyond its borders.”

The exhibition continues through March 22 in New York City. Find more on The Africa Center’s website.

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Kara Walker’s ‘Unmanned Drone’ Reimagines a Confederate Statue of Stonewall Jackson

In 2016, a high school student in Charlottesville, Virginia, launched a petition to remove a number of statues from public view. These included Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Thomas Jefferson, and others, a majority of which a businessman named Paul Goodloe McIntire commissioned in the early 20th century. Over time, these monuments were seen as glorifications of men who furthered Manifest Destiny and condoned slavery, and they continued as emblems of white supremacy.

When the Charlottesville city council approved removing some statues, counterprotestors filed a lawsuit to keep them. And in 2017, during a Unite the Right rally, tensions grew deadly when a man accelerated his vehicle into a group of people, killing one and injuring dozens. The tragedy was an inflection point, but the statues remained until the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, spurred by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, again amplified the conflict on a national scale.

In July 2021, 100 years after its initial unveiling, Charlottesville removed the sculptures of Lee and Jackson. The former was melted down, and the latter was deeded to artist Kara Walker by way of a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Brick. It’s here, as part of the exhibition MONUMENTS, that Walker has boldly re-envisioned the statue as a potent symbol of transformation.

Walker is known for making work, often on a large scale, that engages with symbols and stereotypes of racism. Her monumental piece “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” installed in a former Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn in 2014, comprised a giant sculpture of a woman-sphinx.

With a kerchief evocative of Aunt Jemima, viewers were face-to-face with an architectonic, stereotypically racist interpretation of Southern Black women, especially the notion of the “mammy,” a loyal servant. Walker turned the tables on this image, monumentalizing her into not only a giant decorative confection but also a deity.

For the piece at The Brick, Walker similarly transfigures a symbol of oppression into a compelling, retributive, enigmatic form. “At 13 feet high and 16 feet long, the bronze statue portrayed Jackson spurring his steed, ‘Little Sorrel,’ into the heat of battle,” says a statement.

The reimagined statue, “Unmanned Drone,” dissects the original sculpture created by artist Charles Keck into an unsettling, Hieronymus Bosch-like composition. “Altered beyond recognition, it is, however, still horse and rider,” the gallery says. “Instead of charging into battle, Walker’s headless horseman wanders in Civil War purgatory, dragging its sword over a ruined battlefield.”

The Brick is curated by Hamza Walker—no relation to Kara—who has been collecting decommissioned Confederate monuments from cities around the U.S. Today, the statue of Jackson takes an entirely new form, recontextualized in a way that spins the power to harm into the power to heal. Taken apart limb by limb and reconstructed into a surreal, fragmented, spectral reflection on how the past is woven into the present, Walker contends with the relationship between history and legend.

The title, “Unmanned Drone,” refers simultaneously to aircraft controlled remotely and a kind of low, humming, almost physical sound. The artist is interested in the way that, like a device flying overhead or a deep, reverberating sound, the sculpture also “presses on you…it looms.”

In an interview with Hamza Walker, Kara describes the impetus for memorial statues as rooted in myth. These sculptures are “all about these sometimes misapplied desires—a desire for heroism in a time of poverty and abysmal lack of faith,” she says. “I wanted to deal with the material in a way that was also about the act of separation—separating man from horse and man from myth.”

MONUMENTS is a major group exhibition running concurrently at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Brick, which pairs decommissioned historical monuments with contemporary artists as a response to the layered and living histories post-Civil War. The show continues in Los Angeles through May 3.

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In India, Navneet Jayakumar Documents the Ancient, Elaborate Custom of Theyyam

In the Malabar region of Kerala, India, an ancient Hindu ritual known as Theyyam exists in a continuum of ceremonial customs that date back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The practice carries on today through elaborate costumes and dances during which a performer wears sacred garments and invites a deity to enter their body as a way to seek blessings. Theyyam season, which typically runs from October to May, sees hundreds of performances around the region, with many concentrated between December and February.

“Theyyam is a reminder that the divine exists within and around us,” says artist Navneet Jayakumar, whose lens-based practice centers around explorations of ethnography and the surreal. “In an age of disconnection, its wisdom has the power to ground us and heal a fragmented world.”

Now based in London, Navneet grew up in Malabar, and Theyyam was a memorable part of his childhood. For the first time in 12 years, he returned to Kerala during the ceremonial season and was struck by its intensity and time-honored connection to the region’s cultural heritage. “Witnessing the ritual reignited my curiosity about the broader spiritual and historical context of my culture, the role Theyyam once played in it, and the ways in which colonial narratives had distorted my perception of both,” he says in a statement.

Navneet’s series Beyond the Colonial Gaze documents the ancient custom through an ethnographic lens, aiming to highlight an event that’s little understood outside of the region, primarily due to its oral traditions, which make it challenging to research. “With a lack of traceable records exacerbated further by centuries of colonial intervention, I discovered there was very little information available about the ritual’s broader spiritual context,” he says.

Through the innately visual medium of photography, Navneet set out to record Theyyam to counteract its lack of recognition—especially as an Indigenous tradition that was seen by European colonizers as “uncivilized” or “primitive.” His energetic, glowing images portray meticulously designed costumes and face-painted performers.

Exhibited in different parts of Europe, Navneet’s images represent what he describes as “a symbolic victory of a culture that was destroyed and shunned as barbaric but lives on through me and many, many people back home.” Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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