May 2019
Publication : SudanPhotoGraphs Vol. 5 – Elnour Editions
Exhibition : About Description – Claude Iverné – Bergen Kjøtt – Bergen, Norway – Until June 2019

About description is an exhibition by Claude Iverné (born in France, 1963) showing a
selection of his photographs, films and sound recordings from a large corpus of work made
over twenty years in Sudan for which he was awarded the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson
prize for documentary photography. It is during his first trip to the Sudan in 1999, when he
first documented the Darb al Arba’in, “The forty days track”, that used to link Egypt to the
independent sultanate of Darfur, that his project to explore this country in depth was born.

In Iverné’s work the spectator can decipher his anthropological approach, however the
exhibition creates an open, poetic cartography of this territory that portrays the act of
wandering; linking the image to time. The works document the precipitous transformation
of local and nomadic cultures by the global market economy and the contradictions and
complexity of identity in the last decades in a region that used to be the largest and most
geographically diverse in the African continent.

Iverné uses the editorial form to articulate his photographic work on the Sudan. He has
created a collection of publications entitled SudanPhotoGraphs: aLandTypologyEssay where
images and documents are enriched with his own texts, transcriptions of local discourse and
essays by geographers, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists and authors who have
developed an intimate relationship with this land. The fifth volume linked to the pastoral-
nomadic dilemma in Darfur and Kordofan regions will be published on the occasion of this
exhibition.

— Pia Viewing, co-curator of the exhibition