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Arab News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Photographs in Doha's Tasweer photo festival explore belonging, identity and home in the Arab world
DOHA: A young Sudanese man sits in a chair dressed in an elegant off-white three-piece suit. He holds a small shotgun in one hand which he eyes solemnly while resting against the wall behind him on a crimson red tapestry is a rifle. The photograph is titled 'Life Won't Stop' and is one of several images by Sudanese photographer Mosab Abushama documenting his friend's wedding in Omdurman, Sudan, a city constantly targeted by airstrikes. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @ The photograph is on view as part of the show 'Tadween,' referring to the concept of recording of news and emotions through writing, photography, audio or video, and is one of several exhibitions in the third edition of Doha's Tasweer Photo Festival, which runs until June 20. 'Despite the clashes and random shelling in the city, the wedding was a simple but joyous occasion with family and friends,' wrote in the caption for the work. 'The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, brought horrors and displacement, forcing me to leave my childhood home and move to another part of the city. It was a time none of us ever expected to live through. Yet, this wedding was a reminder of the joy of everyday life still possible amidst the tragedy and despair.' Abushama's photograph earned recognition at the 2025 World Press Photo Awards in the Singles Africa category. Abushama's poignant image is one of many on show this year in the Tasweer Photo Festival that prompt deep reflection and compassion. One of the numerous exhibitions on view is 'Obliteration — Surviving The Inferno: Gaza's Battle for Existence.' The images are displayed outside in Doha's Katara Cultural Village unfolding in five stages to capture each chapter thus far of the war on Gaza. Each image, such as Abdulrahman Zaqout's 'When Food and Water Become Weapons,' has been shot by a Gazan photographer on the ground to witness and experience the catastrophe. From children extending bowls for food to mothers comforting terrified children, each image recounts the tales of horror that continue to unfold as the war in Gaza continues. 'As I Lay Between Two Seas,' another exhibition in the festival, is at the Doha Fire Station. Curated by Meriem Berrada, an independent curator and artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, the exhibition is a poignant and poetic display of 25 photographers from the Arab world and its diasporas grappling and coming to terms with ideas of identity, belonging and home. '(The exhibition) approaches belonging not as a fixed state, but as a fluid, evolving condition shaped by memory, distance, rupture, and imagination,' Berrada told Arab News. 'The exhibition unfolds through a non-linear narrative that invites diverse temporalities and perspectives to coexist.' The title of the exhibition is drawn from a photographic series by Ali Al-Shehabi that conjures up a metaphor that speaks to the fluid, ever changing idea of understanding the self. 'Guided by the metaphor of the sea — shifting, unstable, and expansive — it draws inspiration from poets of the region whose writings on exile and longing offer a conceptual and emotional foundation,' Berrada said. 'The selected works span a wide spectrum from documentary to conceptual and abstract practices. These works examine family and community dynamics, spiritual and philosophical relationships, and the sociopolitical structures that influence selfhood. They explore the symbolic ties to one's roots, often shaped by personal memory and collective histories.' From Lebanese artist Ziad Antar's dreamy and edgy photographs of abandoned and unfinished buildings in Beirut and on the Lebanese coast and Saudi artist Moath Alofi's series of desolated mosques along the winding road to Madinah, Saudi Arabia, to Palestinian Taysir Batniji's 'Just in Case #2' (2024), portraying images of a series of keys representative of feelings of loss and exile, the photographic works on show oscillate between feelings of pride, belonging, loss and longing. A poem by Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish titled 'I Belong There,' appears on one wall between the display of several photographs reflecting through words many of the feelings expressed in the images on display. 'I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born […] I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey. I belong there.' Elsewhere in Tasweer, a solo exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art on the works of Moroccan photographer and filmmaker Daoud Aoulad-Syad titled 'Territories of the Instant' presents the essence of Moroccan popular culture and remote regions in the country. Another exhibition, 'Threads of Light: Stories from the Tasweer Single Image Awards,' presents 31 captivating images from 2023 and 2024 awards highlighting the extraordinary in daily life, including sacred traditions in Oman, dynamic street scenes in Yemen and moments of contemporary change in Iraq and picturesque marine views of traditional boats in Doha. As Berrada said of the festival, which can arguably apply to numerous works and shows in Tasweer this year: 'It also reflects on the photographic medium itself — how image-making can question fixed and often deterministic categories of belonging and become a powerful tool for reimagining identity in a deeply interconnected world.'
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Before and after: images by Sudan's accidental war photographer show loss of everyday life
When Mosab Abushama returned to his house in eastern Omdurman a year into the war in Sudan it was unrecognisable. Like the other buildings in his neighbourhood, the three-storey property he had shared with his extended family was pitted with bullet holes. Some of the walls had been blown through and the charred shells of burnt-out vehicles were scattered along the street. There was debris everywhere, and no water or electricity. 'When we came back, everything had been stolen. There was nothing left – no furniture, no belongings, not even our clothes,' he says. Now in its third year of war, Sudan faces the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands are reportedly dead, hundreds of thousands are facing famine and 13 million people are displaced, including 4 million who have sought refuge abroad. Abushama, 27, and his family were among the millions of Sudanese people who were internally displaced when street-to-street fighting between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in May 2023 forced them from their home. Initially, they moved to northern Omdurman, before most of his relatives sought refuge abroad. Abushama remained behind with his elderly father, who was unable to obtain a visa to leave. In the meantime, their home had become a base for the RSF and his neighbourhood 'a battlefield', he says. Abushama remained in the safer parts of Omdurman, where he threw himself into volunteer work, supporting hospitals and emergency food kitchens in the city. Returning home in March 2024, he had to confront another devastating cost of the conflict – the widespread destruction of the country's already limited infrastructure. Many key landmarks such as the presidential palace and Al-Shaheed Mosque, in Khartoum, have been destroyed. Nearly half of the hospitals in Khartoum state have been damaged, according to a recent report. Nearly all buildings hosting media institutions have been vandalised or destroyed. In parts of Darfur, entire villages have been razed and burned to the ground. Loss and nostalgia have become central themes in Abushama's photography and visual art, as he tries to preserve fragments of life in Sudan in his work. 'This war didn't just take physical things from us – like our city – it was also a war on our memory,' he says. 'That house was everything to me, any sad or happy moment in my life happened there and it was ruined.' Abushama first picked up a camera in 2019, when Sudan was in the throes of large protests after the country's longtime former president, Omar al-Bashir, was ousted from power. It was a hobby at the time, which he pursued alongside his full-time job as a creative assistant at a production house. He occasionally shared what he photographed on his social media accounts. He continued photographing life in Omdurman – of children playing, funerals and families sitting together – even after the war began, posting some online and keeping others. In the process of chronicling the lives around him, he accidentally became a war photographer. 'When the war started I was taking pictures for myself,' he says. 'Then I realised after a few months that I'm documenting people's lives during the war and how it is impacting us.' Sign up to Global Dispatch Get a different world view with a roundup of the best news, features and pictures, curated by our global development team after newsletter promotion Abushama's work is an attempt to spotlight what the destruction has meant for ordinary people in Sudan. His neighbourhood, Wad Nubawi, in eastern Omdurman, was one of the most severely damaged areas in the tri-city region, where the cities of Bahri, Omdurman and the capital Khartoum sit along the banks of the confluence of the White and Blue Nile rivers. 'I'm trying to show people what we're missing, what we loved, how our lives were before,' he says, 'so that people could feel what I feel, and what we all feel in Sudan.' His first photo project, Tadween – Arabic for documenting – appeared in 2023. It emerged from his artistic interest in capturing the mundane aspects of everyday life, such as his grandfather watching prayers broadcast on TV from Mecca during the war, or a child with a rolling wheel toy, playing as a plume of smoke billows up in the background. He also overlays images taken in Omdurman before the war with others taken after the RSF was ejected. In one composition, he juxtaposes an image of the debris of his house today with another of a gathering for his late grandfather, where friends and family had come together to eat and read the Qur'an. Another captures a moment from a street nearby, where a group of men hanging out and playing football is overlaid on to the same street today. The people are no longer there, the shopfronts bear the scars of war, and the streets are strewn with litter. A parked car appears in both images, and in the later one it is so badly damaged that its bonnet seems fused with the road, the tyres gone and the contents of its engine stripped. Abusharma won an award at the World Press Photo contest in Amsterdam this year for a photo taken on his phone of a bridegroom in a suit holding a gun at his wedding in Omdurman. The event was 'beautiful', he says, but the ambient sound was a steady ring of gunfire and deep thuds. 'We had to make it fast,' he says of the wedding. Mohamed Somji, the director of Gulf Photo Plus, a UAE-based photo centre, wants to bring Abushama's work to London in May for an exhibition. He says that what makes his photography powerful is that, in contrast to mainstream coverage of Sudan – which is sometimes 'limited' and 'often abstract' – his work is grounded in people's realities during a time of war in his country. 'Mosab's work stands out because it doesn't just document events in Sudan – it testifies to them in a way that's raw, immediate and deeply human.' 'These moments are not framed for spectacle – they're fragments of survival, grief and resilience,' says Somji. Abushama says he is still trying to process the scale of what has been lost to war. He considers himself fortunate to have found a way to leave the country to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York City but it only intensifies the feelings of loss. 'Things won't be like they were, but we have to retrieve what we can because these are our collective memories,' he says. 'I'm just hoping this ends; every day we're losing something about who we were.' The Tasweer photo festival in Qatar is displaying Mosab Abushama's photography project Tadween until 20 June. Abushama will be online at Peckham 24 sharing his work on 17 May
