Miska Mohmmed

Miska Mohmmed: Sudanese Mindscapes, Memory and Abstract Landscape Painting

Miska Mohmmed is a Sudanese contemporary artist born in 1995 in Omdurman, Sudan. Working primarily with acrylic, markers and mixed drawing techniques on canvas, she creates abstract landscapes that she describes as mindscapes: remembered territories shaped by movement, atmosphere, colour and emotion rather than by literal representation.

Her practice belongs to a broader conversation within contemporary African art, where landscape becomes a way to think about memory, displacement, geography and inner experience. For Mohmmed, the land is never static. It is fluid, changing and emotionally charged, carrying traces of Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Kenya and the many places that have shaped her way of seeing.

View available works by Miska Mohmmed ›

Mindscapes Between Memory and Place

Miska Mohmmed’s paintings are rooted in landscape, but they do not seek to reproduce a specific view. Her works emerge from memory, sensation and accumulated experience. Born in Sudan, raised between Khartoum and Riyadh, and later based in Nairobi, she has developed a visual language shaped by shifting terrains: riverbanks, desert openness, fertile land, urban light and distant horizons.

This movement between places is central to her work. The landscape becomes a field of memory rather than a fixed geography. Colours, lines, dots and flowing shapes suggest the feeling of a place — its weather, rhythm, light and emotional atmosphere — more than its visible details.

The Nile, Khartoum and the Fluidity of Form

Mohmmed’s earliest fascination with landscape was shaped by Khartoum and the meeting of the White Nile and Blue Nile. The movement of water, the contrast between fertile and arid environments, and the visual rhythm of the river continue to inform her paintings. Swirls, horizontal movements, floating forms and layered marks often give her compositions the impression of a world in motion.

Her progression from realism to abstraction allowed her to move away from descriptive landscape and toward a more intuitive form of painting. Brushstrokes, lines and marks respond to one another in a process of action and reaction. The resulting works are open, atmospheric and alive with movement.

Abstraction, Improvisation and Emotional Geography

After receiving her BFA in Painting from the College of Fine and Applied Arts at Sudan University in 2016, Mohmmed’s practice rapidly evolved from observed scenes toward abstraction and free composition. Her paintings reduce mountains, trees, rivers, cities and light into colour, rhythm and form, creating images that feel both expansive and intimate.

This improvisational process is central to the emotional force of her work. A line may lead to a wash of colour; a dot may become a rhythm; a remembered landscape may dissolve into movement. Mohmmed’s paintings are less about place as a destination than place as a sensation held in the body and mind.

A Contemporary Sudanese Voice in Global Landscape Painting

Miska Mohmmed’s work extends the tradition of landscape painting into a contemporary, transnational and deeply personal field. Her landscapes are shaped by Sudanese memory, but also by the experience of movement across countries and climates. They speak to the emotional complexity of belonging to several places at once.

In this sense, her paintings are both geographic and psychological. They invite the viewer to enter a landscape that is remembered, transformed and reimagined. Through colour, gesture and abstraction, Mohmmed creates a visual language of atmosphere, displacement, continuity and return.

Selected Exhibitions, Art Fairs and Collections

Miska Mohmmed’s solo exhibitions include Whispers Between the Waves at OOA Gallery, Highlands of Sudan at OOA Gallery and a solo exhibition at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi.

Her work has also been presented in exhibitions and art fairs including Art Madrid, represented by OOA Gallery; Art Dubai with Circle Art Gallery; Art X Lagos; FNB Art Joburg; 1-54 New York with OOA Gallery; Africa Supernova at Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort; Bridges of Culture: Contemporary African Art through Women’s Eyes at MuEC, Museum of Ethnology and Cultures of the World, Barcelona; Disturbance in the Nile at Casa Árabe, Madrid and Brotéria, Lisbon; What Lingers at HFBK Hamburg; and exhibitions in Sudan, Kenya, Egypt, Dubai, Tunisia, Germany, Spain, Portugal, South Africa and the United States.

Her work is held in selected collections including the Schulting Art Collection, Arak Collection and Africa First.

Available Works

Explore a selection of available works by Miska Mohmmed at OOA Gallery, including abstract landscape paintings and mindscapes that explore memory, movement, geography, water, colour and emotional atmosphere.