Postcards From Cairo

"Postcards from Cairo" is a personal journey of displacement, captured through my lens as a Sudanese refugee in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and photographer André Lützen.

Each image reflects my experience navigating the complexities of exile in Cairo, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and the search for home.

The project is a visual meditation on how a foreign city can become both a refuge and a mirror of one’s own fragmented story.

Cairo, I'm a simple disoriented man in your presence

Living as a refugee in Cairo feels like wandering in a fog where the past and present blur into something indistinct

Time here doesn’t feel linear, instead, it loops and twists in ways that leave me perpetually displaced, not just geographically, but within myself

I meditate on the nature of existence, like whispers I can’t quite hear, the act of searching, though, keeps me grounded, it gives me something to hold onto in the midst of this overwhelming uncertainty

Friendships, once the foundation of my identity, have become fractured by the very act of living

Meeting new people in this city feels like planting seeds in cracked soil, There’s potential, but it feels as if something essential is missing

It offers new faces, but there is a hollowness to these encounters, a sense that I am no longer capable of forming the deep connections I once did

The weight of displacement makes every interaction feel temporary, as though nothing here can truly last

Displacement does something strange to your sense of self, the version of me that existed before this before Cairo, before the war feels like someone else entirely

I am not the person I was when I first arrived in this city, nor will I be the same person when I eventually leave

what I’ve learned from these months in Cairo is that identity is not something fixed, it shifts, changes, is torn apart, and reassembled based on the spaces we inhabit and the experiences we endure