When Only Images Remain

In his second solo exhibition, When Only Images Remain, Sudanese artist Waleed Mohammed investigates archives, tracing histories of displacement and fractured memories, while finding in the images they contain powerful avenues for connection beyond spatial and temporal limitations.

As we enter the exhibition space, we are greeted by a portrait of the artist's parents. Other paintings based on family photo albums are spread throughout the exhibition space. They invoke familiar faces, rendered distant or obscure, but with an almost playful visual language, using pastel crayons to cover the images with childlike patterns. Similarly, a series of photo transfers based on legendary photographer Al-Rashid Mahdi's work highlights the rich photographic archive of Sudan's history from the 1960s and 70s, drawing our attention to modes of self-invention and their historical erasure. We are left with a precarious memory, somewhere between nostalgia and hope, providing both comfort and pain.

These tensions become particularly acute when read through the temporal rupture of displacement, which the artist tackles in several conceptual pieces. Along a wall we find visa-photographs rendered through the artist's unique painterly style as a series of miniature portraits. They are based on actual portraits of Sudanese people whose Schengen visa applications were pending when the war broke out. Instead of shredding the images as instructed, a person at the French embassy shared the photographs with the artist, sparking this powerful series. The thoughts it provokes around individual hopes interrupted by collective trauma are echoed in a sound piece the artist created with fellow artist Sonya Mwambu, compiling voice messages from friends and family with field recordings from Kampala, creating a soundscape that speaks to the different trajectories and challenges of displacement.

Ultimately, these themes coalesce in a video of Waleed's studio in Khartoum, ransacked by looters and left in disarray, yet with his paintings remaining seemingly untouched. It brings to the forefront both the personal impact of war and destruction on the artist's practice, as well as the emotional bonds that still tether him to his homeland.

As Françoise Vergès writes, the violences we face in the present are always also directed at the past and the future. In response to this, she proposes a radical solidarity that is always "imagining also the connection with other worlds or people that we will never meet, that we will never know, but with whom we feel a total connection." Showcasing his works at the Capsule, Waleed takes his own experience of war and exile to investigate what such connections might mean, to histories and futures under attack.