Painter, filmmaker and poet · Sudan
Hussein Shariffe
Hussein Shariffe (1934–2005) was a Sudanese painter, filmmaker and poet, one of the pioneers of modern art in Sudan and associated with the Khartoum School. Trained in England, he exhibited in London in the 1950s, taught at the University of Khartoum, and from 1973 made documentary and poetic films. Forced into exile in the late 1980s, he spent his last years in Cairo.
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Hussein Shariffe was born in Omdurman in 1934 into a prominent Sudanese family. He went to England to study, first history and then art. His first exhibition was at Gallery One in London in 1957, and one source places further London gallery shows in 1958 and 1960. He won recognition in British competitions for young painters.
Back in Sudan he taught at the College of Fine and Applied Art and the University of Khartoum, alongside the artists of what became known as the Khartoum School, led by Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ahmed Shibrain. His paintings, often richly coloured and dreamlike, combine figures, faces and landscape in a personal, lyrical style.
From 1973 he began a second career in film, making documentaries and cinematic essays about Sudan, its culture and its people, and he also wrote poetry. The Dislocation of Amber (1975) is a film about Sawakin, a once prosperous port city now in ruins. Tigers Are Better Looking (1979) adapts a short story by Jean Rhys.
He was forced into exile in Cairo in the late 1980s, and there he continued his film practice and co-directed Diary in Exile (1993) with the Egyptian filmmaker Atteyat Al Abnoudy. He worked until his death in January 2005, aged 70, on an unfinished poetic film essay, Of Dust and Rubies.
How to approach him: start with the films. The Dislocation of Amber makes a ruined port its subject, and the later exile films are essays rather than stories; the dreamlike paintings are best read alongside them, as one body of work by a poet and painter. This reading is the site's own.
Where to find the work
Shariffe's films are the easiest of his works to find: they have been screened in programmes of Sudanese cinema, among them a 2025 programme at the BAM cinema in New York, and by the Arsenal cinema in Berlin. His paintings circulate through auction houses and private collections, so catalogues and museum collection pages are the place to ask. See our list of Sudanese artists.
