On Saturday, in the early morning, I was born at Khartoum Teaching Hospital, only 20 hours after al-Bashir’s military coup, which would rule Sudan for the next three decades. Years later, I spent my early adulthood at my aunt’s house, it was in the police quarter in the downtown of Khartoum. Her house was 2 kilometers away from Sudan's presidential palace and 3 kilometers from the confluence of the Blue and White Nile. My daily walks there shaped my earliest memory of Khartoum. Years after that, the whole quarter was demolished for a private business project.

Later, between 2010 and 2025, a very complicated fifteen years, I witnessed all Sudan’s shifts from different places across Khartoum state, the division of Sudan in 2011, the 2013 uprising, the 2018 revolution, the fall of al-Bashir in 2019, the 2021 military coup, the 2023 war, and becoming displaced in 2025. These events played a huge part of my personality, thoughts and perspectives today.

The River Remains is a long-term mixed-media project that asks what happens to our personal and collective memory in a city where violence and erasure are constant? and how a city marked by conflict can remember itself?

The most important question: Am I the remains of conflict and a river?

© All rights reserved - 2025