War’s scars and hope for healing: Sudanese stories through the art of Amani Azhari

Through her series Healing Sessions, Sudanese visual artist Amani Azhari explores women’s experiences of war and trauma, tracing their emotions and the transformations in their lives through art. Drawing on the traditional gatherings of women in Sudanese homes, she creates space for sharing, mutual support, and psychological healing, while giving expression to the individual and collective wounds left by the war.

Azhari’s paintings portray women in different physical poses, with their expressions and ways of sitting conveying pain, loneliness, comfort, and contemplation. Everyday details also reveal the demands placed on women and the burdens they carry.

Speaking to Radio Dabanga from her studio in Nairobi, the artist says her interest in these scenes began in childhood, when she observed how women sat together, interacted, and used their bodies to express sadness and joy.

Healing Sessions: spaces for recovering from trauma

Azhari began working on the Healing Sessions series after war broke out in Sudan, when she was living in Kampala, Uganda, before moving to Kenya. She describes that period as one of shock and isolation, particularly because she was separated from her Sudanese community and lacked a close social and artistic network in her new surroundings.

The war, she explains, inflicted widespread trauma on Sudanese people. But these wounds did not begin with the fighting: they had accumulated through earlier experiences endured by Sudanese society.

Through Healing Sessions, Azhari brought together Sudanese people living abroad and began listening to their accounts of what they had experienced during the war — the fear, pain, and loss. Some participants cried or shouted as they spoke, while others chose simply to listen. Their responses prompted her to reflect on the psychological impact of these experiences, and on how conversation and sharing can help people understand their feelings and make sense of what is happening around them.

Azhari sees traditional women’s gatherings in Sudan as a form of informal psychological support, even if the women taking part would not necessarily describe them as therapy. Her work recalls gatherings of grandmothers, aunts, and other female relatives in family homes, where women can speak freely, exchange experiences, drink coffee, and unburden themselves away from outside interference.

She describes these gatherings as intimate and almost sacred spaces, offering a sense of safety, belonging, and solidarity.

Motherhood between love and responsibility

The Healing Sessions paintings do not portray women only in moments of rest or social connection. They also explore the psychological and social dimensions of motherhood, the difficult balance between caring for children and working, and the changes and responsibilities that reshape a woman’s life.

One painting depicts a mother and child in a moment of intimacy and protection, while the child appears to be watching what is happening around them. For Azhari, motherhood is not simply a matter of love and care: it demands considerable effort and responsibility, and brings profound changes to a woman’s life.

She explains that the transition from childhood, or from a life in which a woman is cared for by her family, to one in which she must shoulder responsibility herself can happen suddenly. This is particularly true during war, displacement, and exile, when women may find themselves facing the demands of daily life alone.

Azhari reflects on women forced to leave their homes and communities, losing the presence of relatives, friends, and the support networks on which they had relied.

Some find themselves dealing with pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children in unfamiliar surroundings, far from their families — sometimes without anyone who speaks their language or shares the details of their everyday lives.

Azhari’s paintings also draw on her own suffering and experience after the war. She faced pregnancy and childbirth without her husband or family beside her. Her work therefore reflects the profound changes women undergo in different circumstances, as well as the personal experiences that shape her artistic vision.

In her interview with Radio Dabanga, she says that placing women at the centre of her work is a way of expressing herself, but also reflects her awareness of the burdens Sudanese women carry during the war: displacement, exile, family responsibilities, and the struggle to rebuild their lives.

The sofa: a witness to memory and change

One of the series’ most striking works is a large painting, measuring three metres by three metres, in which the artist makes the figures appear to be sitting on a real sofa in front of the viewer.

The sofa occupies a central place in Azhari’s work. It is more than a piece of furniture: it becomes a witness to the changes experienced by the figures, preserving the traces of their encounters, conversations, and emotions. For Azhari, it has become something like an archive or an outside observer, recording the details and transformations unfolding around it.

The way the women sit, the distances between them, and the cushions and objects surrounding them all carry meanings beyond their outward appearance.

In the visual language of Azhari’s work, the sofa becomes a silent stage for the soul. Women sit alongside one another as thoughts gather before they are spoken. Some bodies rest, others collapse, while others seem to float in the air like memories that have slipped free of gravity. Their gazes meet ours with a dreamy boredom or quiet defiance, as though the painting has captured the moment after an event, when everything has fallen silent except the heart.

Colour is freed from the obligation to imitate reality. Lemon yellow and fuchsia pink become languages of feeling rather than skin tones. Deep blue meets fiery orange in a dialogue between night and embers, while decorative patterns — dots, flowers, and patches of colour — become a musical rhythm flowing across fabrics, walls, and sofas.

One of the artist’s most compelling choices is to leave the preparatory drawing visible above the flat areas of colour. The paintings seem to breathe as they take shape, making the first marks part of the story itself.

There are distant echoes of Paul Gauguin’s symbolic use of colour, Henri Matisse’s decorative flattening of warm interiors, Marc Chagall’s dreamlike figures in flight, and Pablo Picasso’s simplification and distortion of form. Yet Azhari draws on these influences only where they serve her own world, creating a distinctive visual language of silent intimacy, waiting, and the beautiful exhaustion of life at home.

Azhari tells Radio Dabanga that these details of domestic space are inseparable from memory and emotion. The places where people spend their time hold the experiences they have lived through, and the moments of happiness, sadness, and change that have shaped them.

The series includes a large work measuring three metres by three metres. Azhari designed it so that the painted figures appear to be sitting on an actual sofa in front of the viewer. The intention is to bring the audience closer to the scene, giving them the sensation of being inside the room rather than simply looking at a painting hanging on a wall.

The room within me: the Sudan we carry with us

Alongside Healing Sessions, Azhari explores displacement and separation from home in a painting entitled The Room Inside Me.

The work considers the idea that Sudan is not merely a geographical place, but an inner space that people carry with them wherever they go. Azhari explains that this symbolic room contains childhood memories, the details of everyday life, customs, traditions, and values that shape a person’s life and identity.

Even when Sudanese people leave their homeland because of war or exile, these details remain present in their memories and influence how they understand the world around them.

The painting includes objects and elements drawn from Azhari’s own memories and personal experience. They suggest that what people carry from their homeland extends beyond material possessions to include emotions, experiences, and relationships that remain with them despite the distance.

For Azhari, this offers a way to explore the relationship between people and their homeland that goes beyond geography, encompassing what lives on in memory and the inner self, and what continues to shape life even after leaving home.

Art as a message against war

Azhari has also taken part in initiatives using art to raise awareness of the war in Sudan and call for an end to the fighting. Among them is the Barddoha campaign.

As part of the campaign, she created a large artwork in the shape of a clock whose hands had stopped at 13 April. The image represents the moment when life stood still under the weight of war. In place of the clock’s conventional hands, she used an inverted rifle — a reference to the misuse of weapons that should protect people and their country but have instead become instruments of destruction and harm.

The work was exhibited during the Berlin conference, with the aim of conveying a visual message about the war in Sudan and prompting discussion about its consequences and the need to end it.

Azhari tells Radio Dabanga that she developed the idea while searching for an artistic form capable of conveying several messages in a single image, rather than relying solely on placards and written slogans. Through the stopped clock and inverted rifle, she sought to express the feeling that time had come to a halt in Sudan while people’s suffering continued.

The artist is also taking part in workshops and discussion sessions with civil society representatives, exploring what art can contribute to addressing the consequences of war and how artists can participate in wider discussions and efforts to respond to the crisis.

Azhari has participated in group exhibitions featuring artists from across East Africa. At one of these exhibitions, she was the only Sudanese artist, presenting two paintings from the Healing Sessions series.

She has also discussed other artistic engagements, including exhibitions scheduled for October, among them one at the residence of the German ambassador in Kenya. These appearances form part of her effort to bring Sudanese experiences to a wider audience and draw attention to the psychological and social changes people are undergoing as a result of war and displacement.

Her message to Sudanese people is one of hope. She hopes they will not lose heart, and that they will remember that life continues despite the harshest circumstances. Confronting the effects of war requires people to comfort one another, understand themselves, and discover what each person can contribute.

It is essential, she says, to preserve one’s passion and continue looking towards the future, without allowing painful experiences to extinguish the desire to live, work, and create.

A diverse series of works by visual artist Amani Azhari in her studio in Nairobi, Kenya (Photos by Radio Dabanga)