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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glowing glass block facades front arkana architects’ ‘villa sipat & sauh’ in bali

arkana architects’ interiors open toward garden and sky

Villa Sipat & Sauh by Arkana Architects sits within a compact site in Bali behind a luminous facade of glass blocks. The project responds to a brief that sought a rental villa with the warmth and familiarity of a private dwelling, expressed through quiet spatial cues and measured material choices.

A small foyer framed by glass blocks introduces this tone. The space opens to the sky, allowing shifting light and occasional rain to shape the atmosphere. This transitional zone leads directly into a kitchen with a modest island counter, an arrangement that places daily rituals at the center of arrival and gives the villa an immediate sense of ease.

images © Thomas Irsyad

‘Villa Sipat & Sauh’ is organized around luminous courtyards

Past the kitchen, Villa Sipat & Sauh’s dining and living areas unfold in a sequence which Arkana Architects defines by a timber and fluted-glass partition. The screen diffuses light while keeping sightlines fluid, creating a gentle gradient between one room and the next.

At the heart of the plan, a pool courtyard provides a pause in the circulation. This open-air core brings brightness and fresh air deep into the interior and anchors movement through the villa, including the stair rising beside the water toward the upper level.

The architects organize the home to balance intimacy with a strong architectural frame. The courtyard mediates between social spaces at the front of the plan and the more secluded sleeping areas toward the rear and above.

Views across the house carry through glass, timber, and curated gaps, giving each room a sense of connection while maintaining clarity of purpose. Light shifts throughout the day, sliding across edges and surfaces, shaping the interior with steady rhythm.

Villa Sipat & Sauh introduces a domestic scale to a rental setting

a home of glowing volumes

The exterior presents a geometric volume defined by expanses of glass blocks. The material lends a soft glow to the facade and filters silhouettes within, offering privacy while inviting curiosity from the street.

This approach gives the villa a distinct identity within its neighborhood. The design leans toward restraint, expressed through controlled openings, firm lines, and a consistent palette that underscores the building’s quiet presence.

Glass blocks play a central role in the project’s character, serving both practical and expressive aims. Their diffuse light complements the interior’s timber elements and the gentle shimmer of the pool, heightening the villa’s calm atmosphere.

The rest of the palette remains measured, allowing texture and proportion to guide the experience. Each material serves its purpose without excess, contributing to the villa’s steady, composed quality.

glass blocks shape the entry with shifting daylight and open sky

Arkana organizes the plan around a calm procession from foyer to kitchen

a restrained palette emphasizes proportion and texture over ornament

upper and lower levels stay connected through framed views across the house

project info:

name: Villa Sipat & Sauh

architect: Arkana Architects | @arkanaarchitects

location: Bali, Indonesia

area: 250 square meters (2,690 square feet)

completion: 2025

photography: © Thomas Irsyad | @thomasirsyad

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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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Pop-Up Letters Set the ‘Alphabet in Motion’ in Kelli Anderson’s Playful Book

As a communication designer, Kelli Anderson began her career in information design. “The act of data visualization is all about bringing facts from the abstract and numerical realm into the sphere of perception, so you can see them,” she says in a video on Kickstarter. “And I thought, why stop there? What if you could also feel and experience those facts?”

Last year, Anderson launched a remarkable, five-years-in-the-making project called Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape, an ABC pop-up book about typography. She spent thousands of hours researching design archives and meticulously engineering kinetic and three-dimensional letters to show how type styles have evolved through the ages.

“If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world—from the Bronze Age to the Information Age,” Anderson says. “But because many of these methods, tools, and machines are now obsolete, this history is challenging to follow. Alphabet in Motion leverages tactile, interactive features to help clarify how letters have transformed alongside technological upheavals and shifting aesthetic moods.”

The project is composed of two conjoined, detachable books. The pop-up section includes an interactive, seven-segment display cover that changes from A to Z, 17 moveable paper elements, and hands-on activities. The accompanying 128-page section contains an essay diving into the history and concept of each pop-up, plus 300 color images from the history of type design.

Anderson’s book originally funded on Kickstarter and is now being released more widely. Secure your copy in the Colossal Shop. Follow along with her work on Instagram, and you might also enjoy another of her projects, This Book Is a Camera.

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Antique Writing Desks Converge with African Masks in Sonia E. Barrett’s Sculptures

When we think of the European colonization of Africa, one period that comes to mind is an era during the mid- to late-1800s known as the Scramble for Africa. The British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—predominantly—had already staked control of communities in coastal areas. It was during this time that inland regions became increasingly attractive for resource extraction and the promise of further economic gain. But the so-called Scramble for Africa was far from the beginning.

By the 1870s, Europeans controlled one-tenth of the continent, mostly in the north, along the Mediterranean, and in the far south. The Dutch East India Company had established the first European settlement in Africa in Cape Town in 1652. But the transatlantic slave trade had already been active for nearly a century and would continue for nearly two more, during which a staggering 12.5 million or more people were put on ships—mostly to the New World.

During this time, colonists wrote and conveyed all messages by hand. Small, portable, wooden desks made it possible to send letters from virtually anywhere, with fold-out surfaces covered in leather and storage areas for holding pens, nibs, and ink.

For artist Sonia E. Barrett, these antique desks are a tangible connection to a protracted era of cultural clashes fraught with greed, violence, and usually a one-sided telling of history. “These were the laptops of the day,” Barrett says of the portable tools that form her Desk series. “On them, they ‘wrote Africa’ in letters home, journals, and reports that now form the archives in Europe of Africa.”

Using pieces of reclaimed wood, leather, velvet, pens, ink, and wicker in addition to the found Edwardian writing surfaces, Barrett animates her sculptures with expressive faces redolent of African ceremonial masks. “I thought (the desks) could be a way of speaking back to Empire beyond the archived letters written on them.”

While different regions and cultures across the African continent created unique masks reflective of their beliefs and traditions since time immemorial, the European fashion for collecting these objects gave rise to a commercial industry that continues today. Similar to the wooden desks covered in leather or velvet, the carved African masks were whittled from timber and embellished with leather. The mahogany used in the manufacture of the writing desk would have matured in a tropical climate, “shipped in much the same way as we were,” the artist says, referring to the international African slave trade.

Barrett adds wicker structures to the bases of the desks, which suggest shoulders and bodies and can also be donned loosely, as one would wear a ceremonial costume. In a sense, the pieces are like conduits or metaphysical transporters. “These heads can join with African diasporan bodies and enable us to reach back, as they enabled our ancestors,” the artist says.

Some of Barrett’s sculptures are on display as part of The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope at Messums London, which continues through November 15. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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Dive into the Painstaking Process of Restoring an 18th-Century Fan

Armed with tweezers, a porcupine quill, and more patience than most of us could fathom, the senior paper conservator of the Victoria & Albert Museum tackles a finicky restoration project in a new video. Susan Catcher walks us through her impeccably precise process as she restores a damaged fan dating back 200 years. She shares insights into her techniques and materials, all of which have to be reversible should the project need to be redone.

This video is one of many within the V&A’s series on conservation, which includes restoring Shakespearean costumes, a portrait of Marie Antoinette, and a Samurai figure. Watch more on YouTube.

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What Do Astronomy and Jewelry Have in Common? In the Late Renaissance, Look to the Stars

In the famous first stanza of the 17th-century poem “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake writes:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Perhaps Blake didn’t intend us to literally hold infinity in our hands, but he may have been aware that there was, in a manner of speaking, a way to don the entire known universe.

Combining the elegance of gold jewelry with the meticulous craftsmanship of intricate timepieces, a unique style of ring emerged from a fashion for the cosmos during the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as armillary rings, these deceptively simple gold creations can be worn on the finger like any other band, but when removed, they open up into a sphere made of several interconnecting circular bands operated by delicate hinges.

Examples of armillary rings in the British Museum and the Swedish National Museums of History have been traced to Germany, made during the Late Renaissance as the study of astronomy reached new heights. In 1543, Copernicus essentially launched the scientific revolution when he claimed that the Earth rotates around the Sun, not the other way around.

A few years later, Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, known as a pioneer of observational astronomy, built a telescope powerful enough to, for the first time, observe the stars of the Milky Way, see Jupiter’s four largest satellites, and make out Saturn’s rings, among other discoveries.

The historic gold rings are based on ancient astronomical instruments called armillary spheres, which emerged from the long-disproven theory that everything in the cosmos revolved around Earth. The designs, which were used since at least the 2nd century, place our planet at the center. A group of rings rotates on an axis, providing reference points for locating other celestial bodies. Separate bands correlate to the equator, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the revolution of the Sun—a ring which also represents the constellations of the Zodiac.

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Spanning 120 Years and 55 Countries, ‘The Family of Migrants’ Portrays a Broad Story of Human Movement

In 2022, twenty-one-year-old Tanya choked back tears as she held her boyfriend’s hand for what could be the last time. Crouching down to reach her, the military fatigue-clad Volodimir stands on a train headed for the city of Kramatorsk in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. He’s on his way to the battlefield to fight Russia’s invasion.

Taken by Ilvy Nijokiktijen, the photo capturing this heartwrenching moment is one of nearly 200 included in a book and large-scale exhibition at Fenix, a new art museum in Rotterdam that focuses entirely on migration. The Family of Migrants takes a broad look at human movement from 1905 to the present day, citing a wide array of reasons someone might relocate from war and economic crises to exile and internment to a search for opportunities abroad.

Spanning documentary, portraits, and photojournalism, the included images emerge from 136 photographers in 55 countries across 120 years. Providing such an expansive perspective of movement connects myriad experiences—from a Ukrainian soldier off to war to a young Afghan refugee to a poverty-stricken mother and her children—and is an attempt to broaden how we think of migration.

“In every era, there has been movement of people, be it out of free will, out of necessity, or under pressure. Migration shapes the world, separating and connecting people, but when we talk about migration, the focus all too quickly shifts to figures or politics,” curator Hanneke Mantel says.

The title references the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Family of Man. Curated by Edward Steichen, the bold exhibition included hundreds of photos that presented a narrative of global solidarity after World War II. Steichan wanted to depict “the gamut of life from birth to death,” a task Mantel seems to take on at Fenix by sharing a fuller story of migration today.

The Family of Migrants, published by Hannibal Books, includes photos by icons like Dorothea Lange and Ernest Cole, along with those working today like Alejandro Cegarra. Find your copy on Bookshop.

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Explore Trailblazing Street Photography in ‘Faces in the Crowd’ at MFA Boston

When playwright Tennessee Williams reflected on the oeuvre of photographer Stephen Shore in 1982, he said, “His work is Nabokovian for me: Exposing so much and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.” The sentiment mirrors not only the power of Shore’s work but the capacity of street photography, more broadly, to provoke wonder and curiosity where we least expect it: the everyday.

Shore was among the first to adopt color photography as an artistic medium, traveling throughout America to document quotidian scenes of life in rural towns and big cities alike. His work followed behemoths of the medium like Walker Evans and Robert Frank and set the stage for others who emerged in his footsteps, including Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, and Martin Parr, among many others.

Shore is included in Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which explores the ever-evolving techniques and approaches that photographers use to document people and daily life. Seminal works from the 1970s to the 1990s by Shore, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, and Yolanda Andrade, among others, are complemented by more recent contributions to the genre by artists like Parr, Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, and Zoe Strauss.

Today, smartphones with powerful digital cameras have made photography more accessible than ever—and also completely transformed the medium. With people always unabashedly filming—taking photos, making videos, posting to social media—in the city, “photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street,” the MFA says.

The difference between snapshots and art is perhaps partly in intention, although that line is often purposely blurred. Bey’s striking “A Man and Two Women After a Church Service,” for example, captures a seemingly simple scene, yet the composition and clarity are a testament to timing and technical expertise. In what feels like simultaneously a public and private moment, the 1976 image glimpses both a particular scene and an American historical period.

Whether taken decades ago or snapped within the past few years, the images in Faces in the Crowd invite us into each experience. Luc Delahaye’s “Taxi,” for example, captures a solemn, intimate, enigmatic moment as a mother holds her young son in her arms in the back of a vehicle.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s crowd photo, taken from the hip, immerses us in the thrum of a city thoroughfare. And Yolanda Andrade captures an uncanny blip when a street performer disappears behind the unsettlingly large head of a puppet. The MFA says, “Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous.”

Faces in the Crowd opens on October 11 and runs through July 13, 2026. Find more on the museum’s website. You might also enjoy A Sense of Wonder, a monograph of the work of Joel Meyerowitz that was just released by SKIRA.

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