“It’s hard to imagine. It’s very bad,” says the owner of the Downtown Gallery, stating that it wasn’t the war he thought he was going to talk about when this exhibition started being prepared with Brotéria, in Lisbon.

Works that the war made rare escaped the destruction of Sudan’s capital, from where some of them left the day before the fighting started, and are now in Lisbon, in an exhibition that started being prepared more than a year ago.

Then came the destructionthe dead bodies in the streets, the crazy looting and vandalism, the dangers and lack of food, the lack of functioning hospitals, the lack of all kinds of supplies, the collapse of the banking system,” said Rahiem Shadad, a Sudanese and one of the curators of the exhibition, based on reports he receives from Khartoum.

The three dozen works, by nine Sudanese artists, are, in some cases, the few remaining from the work they developed in recent years, revealed Shadad and António Pinto Ribeiro, the other curator of the “Disturbance in the Nile” exhibition, in statements to Lusa news agency.

Rahiem Shadad, owner of a gallery in the neighborhood that gathered most of them and the workshops of artists in Khartoum, left Sudan with her family at the end of March for what she thought would be a two-week vacation in Egypt, but the War broke out and they could not return, remaining in Cairo until now.

This neighborhood, being located near the presidential palace and not far from the airport perimeter, was among the first to be targeted by the attacks that, since April 15, oppose the militias of the Rapid Intervention Forces (RSF) to the Sudanese army.

Since then, these artists, gallerists and all those who work in the art scene could not access that area“, he explained, advancing that on April 24 he had information that a building next to the gallery was on fire and then received another report, “in mid-May, saying that there is not a single safe house” in that area of the city, “that everything was either destroyed or looted, vandalized.”

“It’s hard to imagine. It’s very bad,” he said, stressing that it wasn’t the war he thought he would be talking about when his Downtown Gallery and Brotéria, in Lisbon, where the exhibition runs until July 28, began preparing it almost a year and a half ago.

It turned out to be fortunate, since many of the works there are among the few remaining from the nine artists, who have since fled to Egypt, to Spain, or to regions of Sudan farther away from the combat zones.

“The last works came out the day before the fighting started. If it were a day later, it wouldn’t happen,” said António Pinto Ribeiro, who highlighted in the interview to Lusa the “extraordinary” phase of Khartoum’s artistic production.

The works are by artists from three generations, aged between 20 and 70, and considered witnesses of a phase of great change in the modern history of SudanPinto Ribeiro also explained, stressing that this is what this exhibition wants to show the world: “A work of reference.

We didn’t plan to talk about the war,” the Sudanese gallerist also insisted, describing that the name given to the exhibition is because the objective was and still is “to give people a story about what expression in Sudan” throughout its history in a “very contemporary” way portrayed on these canvases.

“The art scene in Sudan was very flourishing. It was growing exponentially,” with “three galleries opening last year. You could visit temporary exhibitions all over the country” and artists who managed to escape the war are already getting many of them back into production, Rahiem Shadad said.

“This exhibition may appear as something exotic, but in fact it’s not”, it’s arich artistic production that, while not exactly unknown in Europe, has some singularities that prevented its dissemination, since the state of conflict for decades, emphasized Pinto Ribeiro.

After Lisbon, these paintings that escaped the war in Sudan will be in Berlin in November, and the goal for now is that they will also pass through at least Madrid and Paris.