Connect Sudan

Installation from 23rd November - 2nd December @ AL.Berlin
Info event - Tuesday, 23rd November, 19:00-20:30

The Sudanese revolutionary movement, led by the neighborhood-based resistance committees, mobilized immediately, as did many other civic bodies, from unions to collectives and women’s organizations, who declared a campaign of total civil disobedience against the military. The civil disobedience, in the face of brutal violence from the military, has included strikes, protests, marches and barricade-building.
In this exhibition, we take the barricade as the starting point to engage with the resistance in Sudan. Barricades have long been used as a popular self-defense tactic by revolutionary movements and communities in Sudan, who brought down military regimes in 1964, 1985 and 2019. Youth build, maintain and defend barricades using brick, tires and discarded metal and other objects. Since most arrests and killings by the state rely on the ability to move around the city, these barricades are designed to save lives.
The barricades are more than physical though- they are also symbolic. They signal liberated space, and the refusal of the Sudanese people to accept the violence of the military or its rule. They signal that the streets don’t belong to power-they belong to the people. They signal that the revolution continues.
When danger is sensed, Sudanese revolutionaries often use the phrase “wake up, barricade”, to alert each other that the barricades have to be maintained and defended. Sometimes, these barricades are defended to the death. In fact, Sudanese revolutionaries have fallen at the barricades. The martyr Kisha is one such revolutionary- he was killed on June 3rd, 2019 defending a barricade at the mass sit-in in front of the Military General Command, which was brutally attacked and dispersed that day.
Our installation features barricades built by members of SudanUprising Germany in solidarity with our brothers* and sisters* in Sudan, who are courageously resisting the coup and defending the slogan of the revolution: “freedom, peace and justice” with their lives. The installation, which will be open from 23.11. to 02.12., will feature testimonies, words and images from Sudan’s revolution. It is an homage not just to Sudan’s revolutionaries but revolutionaries the world over.