Born in Khartoum in 1966, Salah El Mur studied at the College of Fine and Applied Art at Sudan University. Following his graduation in 1989, he spent a number of months travelling across East Africa and the Middle East.

Mur was profoundly influenced by the people he encountered during this period, and their relationships with their environment. This being said, El Mur's works are characterized by the artist's incorporation of Sudanese visual vocabulary: the synthesis of personal memories with collective myths and folklore. El Mur describes the impact of his childhood and his exposure to age old traditions as being critical to his creative process:"I was born in one of the villages of the western bank of the blue river...