Disturbance in the Nile Agitación en el Nilo
Casa Arabe, Madrid until 30th June 2024
Setting the Scene
Above, and title image, Far from Home, by Eltayeb DawElbait; engraving and acrylic on wood. Eltayeb DawElbait is one of eleven Sudanese artists featured in the Disturbance in the Nile; Agitación en el Nilo exhibition, hosted by Casa Árabe, Madrid.
The Nairobi-based artist DawElbait, (Karraw, Kosti, 1968), fled Sudan’s Bashir regime for the greater artistic freedom of Kenya. There he has established himself as a force of innovation in African art. His derives his inspiration from his childhood memories of rural Sudan, “astronomy, the desert and the Sudanese sky”. HIs arresting and often searingly melancholic portraits of those dear to him in childhood and his Kenyan contemporaries emerge from canvases of recycled discarded wood and metal. By reusing these materials and “retaining their original colours and echoes of their functionality”, ElTayeb DawElbait seeks to honour and breathe new life into them. (Interview, Casa Arabe, In Spanish, embedded below).
See too my article, ElTayeb DawElbait.
Above, Yasmeen Abdullah‘s depiction of two generals playing chess; “I don’t know who sold the country but I know who paid the price”, acrylic on canvas. Yasmeen’s work tells stories in an intensely individualistic, codified and symbolic form; the flux of her subjects’ thoughts often embodied by fish and breadcrumbs become cyphers for reflections of the past. Jasmeen Abdullah, (Doha, Qatar, 1992) was to find her artistic identity in painting after reading the poetry of the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish.
Yasmeen is one of three leading young Sudanese women artists represented in the exhibition, accompanied by Reem Al Jeally and Miska Mohammad.
More on these and other remarkable artists represented in the exhibition next month.
Bringing Sudanese Art to the Global North; Rahiem Shadad
Above, Rahiem Shadad, Co-Curator with António Pinto Ribeiro of this groundbreaking exhibition, bringing Sudanese art to the global north. Rahiem is pictured here in his Downtown Gallery, Khartoum in the happier days of 2019. Rahiem was kind enough to speak to me about his artistic powerhouse of a gallery, the impact of the war on the arts and his Sponsor an Artist initiative in Artists in the Midst of War
Read an in-depth interview with Rahiem in Andariyya’s Beyond the Headlines: How a Sudanese Curator put his Country’s Art on the Global Map Despite Conflict
Above, some of the works exhibited in the Downtown Gallery in 2019 when I visited. Rahiem still does not know how many – if any – of these and other works have survived the war.
The Context
Highlights of the Exhibition
The Context
“Even when lives and homes are ripped from a community, the collective voice and expression of a peoplel cannot be silenced.” Exhibition notes
Disturbance in The Nile: Agitación en el Nilo, Casa Árabe Madrid offers a sweeping vision of Sudanese artistic talent across the generations, celebrating both up-and-coming young artists such as Waleed Mohammed (see below) and revered pioneers in modern Sudanese art such as Rashid Diab and Mohammad Otaybi. The artists exhibited have all, in some way, been forged by the social and political upheavals of their time. The exhibition draws on the outpouring of creativity of the young artists whose work both documented and informed the uprisings of 2018-19 and the long trajectory of post-independence Sudanese artists seeking a unique Afro-Arab Sudanese response to the cultural challenges of their time. It traces the dramatic impact on artists’ style and subject matter pre-and post-war and reveals how Sudanese artists have seen art as expressions of and vehicles for unity and dialogue in a land riven by racism, religious and ethnic division.
Rashid Diab reminds us at the exhibition inauguration (see below) that Sudan was home to one of Africa’ first faculties of art and by the mid-1950s Sudanese artists were rapidly moving away from the imitation of western artistic forms to develop new and unique schools of artistic thought and practice; their goal to provide Sudanese Afro-Arab answers to their homeland’s problems. In the process, Sudanese artists such as Ibrahim Salahi, Kamala Ishaq and the Khartoum School movement have had profound international influence on the understanding of art.
Perhaps the overriding message of this exhibition is that Sudanese art stands alongside western art on its own terms and in its own right. That there should be an exhibition at all is nothing short of a miracle. Most of the works featured had, by luck, been loaded onto a plane destined for exhibition in Lisbon’s Galería Brotéria just hours before Khartoum Airport was destroyed by bombing. See “Arte refugiado” de Sudán. At this time of great tragedy for Sudan, Rashid Diab’s words are especially poignant; Sudanese art, he observes, is imbued with sadness and sense of loss; loss for “a country that has never been what it should have been.”
Above right, “Conversation II”, Rashid Diab.
Highlights of the Exhibition
Above, pre-and post-war works of Abubakr Bakri Moaz, left; Untitled 3 and right, the visual shock of “Exit”. The artist, born and raised in Khartoum, opened his own studio in 2017 and has been exhibited in Germany, Kenya and Dubai. He explores the interplay of the material and spiritual in his work.
Above, the stunning ink works of Tariq Nasre, Dongola 1964. Artist, illustrator and international award holder for services to literacy, Tariq Nasre’s fluid oval forms and recurring motifs drawn from multiple ethnic traditions are delicately interwoven in his dense, flowing canvases. Note below the ornate hulaal comb worn with pride in thick curls and emblematic of Hadendoa male dress of eastern Sudan. It appears next to the tightly woven plaits beloved of northern Sudanese women, and flanked by forms echoing both Arabic calligraphy and creatures redolent of Nile mythology and animism.
More on Tariq Nasre next month.
Waleed Mohammed‘s work, left; detail from Black people are dope” and right, “Something Special”. Waleed is the youngest artist exhibited, 24, and his work explores racism and segregation, the fracturing and complex unity of Sudanese identity, such as in the portrait of the woman above, who bears multiple Arab, non-Arab and Nubian tokens of identity. The portrait also reveals Waleed’s early fascination for Sudanese portrait photography.
See, for example, the groundbreaking portraiture of Rashid Mahdi
Above, “Entwined” by Reem Al Jeally, Khartoum 1998, artist and founder of Bait Alnisa, curating and promoting the work of Sudanese women artists. Her work explores the tense interplay between public and private space for Muslim women and those existential spaces lying between. From her own room looking out into the street she is both observer and questioner of experiences common to all.
The exhibition also includes heartbreaking footage of everyday Sudanese life ripped apart by the outbreak of war in a short film by Hassan Hamil, Khartoum, 1994.
Below, Agitación en el Nilo, la revolución artística sudanesa; Introduction to the Exhibition with contributions by some of the artists featured, co-curator Rahiem Shadad and The Casa Arabe, Madrid.
Women's literacy in Sudan 