In Salah Elmur’s small portraits, the history of Sudan is approached with tenderness through the faces of its inhabitants—figures drawn from memory as well as from photographic archives inherited from the artist’s father, a local photographer in Khartoum. Intimacy and history quietly intersect.

The recurring motif of the double face, often associated with Surrealism, instead originates in Elmur’s photographic sources. In long-exposure studio portraits, slight movements would cause the subject’s features to appear doubled. Elmur translates this photographic accident into painting, transforming it into a poetic device that speaks to memory, displacement, and the fragility of representation.