1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:19,350 Good evening. So in my lecture today, I wish to take us to the Sudan, where between 1969 and 1985, it was ruled by. 2 00:00:20,730 --> 00:00:28,680 The military dictator General Jaafar al-Marri, through cycles of civil war, 3 00:00:29,640 --> 00:00:36,060 modernisation and nationalisation programs and purges of political opponents. 4 00:00:37,880 --> 00:00:50,090 Within this context, I examined the calligraphic figuration of Ibrahim el Salahi, the country's leading modernist and one time political prisoner. 5 00:00:51,990 --> 00:01:00,690 By juxtaposing Salahi's work to those of other Sudanese artists and in view of contemporary 6 00:01:00,960 --> 00:01:09,750 debates on the role of art in a nation seized by the turbulent whims of a sovereign big man, 7 00:01:10,950 --> 00:01:16,170 I propose that the sophisticated formalism of his drawings, 8 00:01:17,010 --> 00:01:26,280 including his series he created soon after imprisonment, constituted a meditative commentary. 9 00:01:27,280 --> 00:01:38,440 On a dictatorship that survived by stoking religious and ethnic crisis and systematic suppression of all opinions. 10 00:01:40,520 --> 00:01:45,980 But let me acknowledge two people who helped me along my journey. 11 00:01:47,010 --> 00:01:53,390 From Nigeria to the art world. First is Simon Altenburg, 12 00:01:53,630 --> 00:02:07,460 who supported my graduate education in the United States after I was dismissed from soccer in the mid 1990s by the universities. 13 00:02:07,850 --> 00:02:14,300 Small letter. Big man acting for the then military dictator. 14 00:02:15,870 --> 00:02:24,510 Thanks to Simon, I finished my Masters in Art History before proceeding to Emory for my doctoral studies. 15 00:02:26,400 --> 00:02:36,630 Second is the artist Amy Ableman, a classmate at Tampa who with her family, 16 00:02:37,080 --> 00:02:44,970 provided me an emotional home during those years and sponsored the production of my master's thesis. 17 00:02:46,380 --> 00:02:51,690 For this, I am eternally grateful to Simon and any. 18 00:02:53,270 --> 00:02:56,510 And with that, I turn to today's topic. 19 00:03:05,130 --> 00:03:13,310 Ibrahim al Salah. He. Produced in nine panel mural scale drawing. 20 00:03:14,030 --> 00:03:22,040 That is, by every measure, a tour de force of draughtsmanship and design. 21 00:03:23,310 --> 00:03:36,420 A magnificent demonstration of the artist's decades long quest for mastery of the art of ink drawing, or what he called black and white painting. 22 00:03:38,140 --> 00:03:47,230 The orchestral organisation of negative and positive space and intrepid control of line as a 23 00:03:47,230 --> 00:03:56,260 trail or boundary of space and shapes in this work surprised the viewer by showing so much, 24 00:03:56,440 --> 00:03:58,930 yet revealing even less. 25 00:04:00,160 --> 00:04:12,370 Across the nine panels forms, lines, shapes concentrate into areas of decorative and tonal excess and then suddenly disappear, 26 00:04:12,370 --> 00:04:22,780 leaving areas of silence and emptiness so complete loaded and of equal compositional weight as the blackest of passages. 27 00:04:24,240 --> 00:04:33,780 Yet Salahi somehow manages to not use ink washes to achieve the work's strong tonal range. 28 00:04:34,740 --> 00:04:41,940 Instead, he painstakingly laboured over the paper surface with single, precise lines, 29 00:04:42,510 --> 00:04:48,630 layering them over each other until he achieved the tonal gradations, 30 00:04:48,960 --> 00:05:01,860 structuring the composition from the light grey shaped elements to the pitch black zones that produced the formal symphonies breaking into, 31 00:05:01,890 --> 00:05:08,430 streaking across, and binding the rigid boundaries of the work's constitutive panels. 32 00:05:11,160 --> 00:05:15,270 He calls this mode of image making black and white painting. 33 00:05:16,980 --> 00:05:24,330 As we relish in the festival of organic and geometric line, shape and form, 34 00:05:24,930 --> 00:05:33,270 our eyes roll compelling as much or compelled as much by the pleasure of looking as 35 00:05:33,270 --> 00:05:40,470 by the need to extricate from the dizzying composition human forms trapped within. 36 00:05:42,400 --> 00:05:51,370 Wherever our gaze commences, it emphatically returns to the top centre panel, dominated by a powerful hand, 37 00:05:51,640 --> 00:06:04,300 with clenched fist displays at a 45 degree angle toward the left, alongside a geometric blade like form partially hiding. 38 00:06:06,030 --> 00:06:10,350 What might be a stylised human head. 39 00:06:12,490 --> 00:06:22,420 Despite a continuation of lines and forms from this torso to the surrounding panels, they all break into tonal abstraction. 40 00:06:23,670 --> 00:06:38,610 On further inspection. We barely recognise five other heads and faces and possibly is a morphic mask all within the three meet horizontal panels. 41 00:06:40,660 --> 00:06:45,730 For all these heads and torsos, there are only three visible. 42 00:06:47,110 --> 00:06:57,969 An exquisitely drawn hands and four feet, two clearly belonging to the one full figure in the entire composition, 43 00:06:57,970 --> 00:07:02,410 standing upright and motionless to the left. 44 00:07:03,280 --> 00:07:13,269 In fact, this lone faced figure, his body seemingly built or perhaps hidden under mechanical armour, 45 00:07:13,270 --> 00:07:26,350 top and floral patterned sweeping skirt, serves as a static wedge against the overall dynamic leftward thrust of the entire composition. 46 00:07:29,080 --> 00:07:38,050 But what do we make of the body fragments and the orgiastic forms of the sudden and 47 00:07:38,440 --> 00:07:46,300 illogical turns from moments of cognition to species of to incomprehensibility? 48 00:07:47,810 --> 00:07:51,620 And why is this work titled The Inevitable? 49 00:07:53,910 --> 00:07:58,980 This last question takes us back to the and raised fist. 50 00:07:59,280 --> 00:08:08,820 One of the most recognisable symbols of mass action, people's power, collective resistance and revolutionary movements. 51 00:08:09,900 --> 00:08:20,490 Its prominence in the composition suggests that whatever else might might have occupied Salahi's mind as he made this work, which took several months. 52 00:08:21,000 --> 00:08:31,470 He must have been thinking about or perhaps willing, a specific outcome of ongoing political turmoil in the Sudan. 53 00:08:34,230 --> 00:08:41,309 And it is often remarked that the word is his response to the mass strikes that erupted 54 00:08:41,310 --> 00:08:51,090 in Khartoum in early April 1985 that some have called the second Sudanese revolution. 55 00:08:52,830 --> 00:09:06,060 However, given that Salahi started this war perhaps months before these events, I will argue that its meaning goes beyond this specific event. 56 00:09:08,620 --> 00:09:12,010 I shall return to this work towards the end of today's lecture. 57 00:09:12,640 --> 00:09:22,240 But together, let us take a longer view of the political and art history that led to the revolutionary 58 00:09:22,240 --> 00:09:33,940 days of April 1985 and the making of arguably the most important work by El Salahi. 59 00:09:39,020 --> 00:09:49,759 In my introductory lecture, I noted the difference in outlook and objectives between the 1950s and sixties generation 60 00:09:49,760 --> 00:09:56,510 of African post-colonial modernists and contemporary artists of the subsequent decades. 61 00:09:58,100 --> 00:10:04,309 Despite recognising the preponderant distinction between the identity and national 62 00:10:04,310 --> 00:10:10,760 culture focussed inquiry of the modernists and the contemporary artists. 63 00:10:10,760 --> 00:10:14,930 Critical reflection on the continent's postcolonial condition. 64 00:10:15,680 --> 00:10:23,540 I also noted that there are artists such as Gadsby's Siri who we have seen before, and Salahi, 65 00:10:23,540 --> 00:10:30,740 whose careers unfolded across the conceptual and temporal boundaries of the modern and the contemporary. 66 00:10:32,770 --> 00:10:43,569 Salahi's work. I also participated in the production and articulation of modernist national cultures of the sixties that followed in the 67 00:10:43,570 --> 00:10:54,460 1970s and eighties by the critical examination of the post-colonial condition based on his experience in the Mary's Sudan. 68 00:10:56,280 --> 00:10:58,649 What is beyond doubt, however, 69 00:10:58,650 --> 00:11:07,290 is the profundity of his dedication to registers of artistic practice and discourse at different moments in his long career. 70 00:11:08,540 --> 00:11:17,720 Indeed, I will be suggesting that the full appreciation of the formal uniqueness and conceptual substantiality 71 00:11:18,380 --> 00:11:26,150 of his present drawings and other works that emerged from his incarceration by the Marin regime, 72 00:11:26,660 --> 00:11:39,950 including the inevitable, is impossible without connecting them to his earlier, formal experimentation inspired by the modernist cultural nationalism. 73 00:11:43,740 --> 00:11:54,540 There is scholarly consensus on the importance of the School of Fine and Applied Arts, Khartoum's place in the history of modern African art. 74 00:11:55,320 --> 00:12:08,850 For it is there that a group of artists identified by the Guyanese artist and scholar Dennis Williams as the Khartoum School in the early 1960s, 75 00:12:09,210 --> 00:12:13,470 led by Osman Rockefeller. Mohamed Ibrahim. 76 00:12:14,410 --> 00:12:21,980 Kamala Ishaq and Salahi. As leaders of Sudanese postcolonial modernism. 77 00:12:22,220 --> 00:12:33,530 Their work was based on the recognition of the country's complex blend of Arab and black African histories, cultures and traditions. 78 00:12:35,340 --> 00:12:46,980 But a key focus of their work was on the foundational importance of the Arabic calligraphic text in their pictorial and formal language. 79 00:12:48,120 --> 00:12:59,750 Whereas Wakil and she brain emphasised the sufficiency of the Arabic text as the resource for their pictorial experimentation. 80 00:13:01,210 --> 00:13:06,340 Salahi was more invested in the broader context of Sudanese national identity, 81 00:13:06,340 --> 00:13:16,180 which for him and his contemporaries in literature associated with the so-called jungle and desert school. 82 00:13:17,620 --> 00:13:26,290 Must contend with the cultures of Arab and Islamic north and of southern black Sudan. 83 00:13:28,090 --> 00:13:38,050 Reflecting this understanding of Sudan as a meeting point of cultures in the constitution of the country's post-independence national identity. 84 00:13:38,890 --> 00:13:43,630 Salah Ahmed Ibrahim, a member of the Jungle and Desert School, 85 00:13:44,380 --> 00:13:55,630 wrote in his 1958 poetry collection, The Ebony Forest, quote, Liar is he who proclaims I am. 86 00:13:55,900 --> 00:13:58,990 They are mixed. The pure pedigree. 87 00:13:59,560 --> 00:14:03,310 The only. Yes. Elia. 88 00:14:05,590 --> 00:14:12,190 While Salahi came to the same conclusion about his artistic identity when, for instance, 89 00:14:12,190 --> 00:14:21,010 in 1967, he echoed the poet by asserting, I am a mixture of Negro and Arab. 90 00:14:23,450 --> 00:14:31,050 Well, it did not come easy. Four while a student at the Slade. 91 00:14:32,460 --> 00:14:42,600 In the era of Sir William Coldstream, he was fully immersed in the figurative modernism of the British post-war era. 92 00:14:43,920 --> 00:14:51,150 But on his return to the Sudan in 1957, one year after the country's political independence, 93 00:14:51,660 --> 00:14:56,010 Salahi organised an exhibition of his late work in Khartoum. 94 00:14:57,630 --> 00:15:04,590 But confronted by the cold reception of the work by his own people. 95 00:15:05,660 --> 00:15:15,020 He returned to the studio and travelled through the Sudan, burdened by a crisis of relevance in his home country. 96 00:15:16,370 --> 00:15:24,829 He sought out local artistic resources with which to reinvent his work, settling on Arabic calligraphy, 97 00:15:24,830 --> 00:15:31,970 but also on diverse folk art and design, including metalwork and basketry. 98 00:15:33,780 --> 00:15:41,580 But he also studied West African and ancient Nubian ritual and sculptural traditions, all of which contributed. 99 00:15:42,640 --> 00:15:48,940 So the radical transformation that occurred in his work around 1960. 100 00:15:51,460 --> 00:16:01,120 What is clear then is that his immersion in the ideological and existential space of postcolonial Sudan compelled 101 00:16:01,120 --> 00:16:11,770 him to realign and refocus his work so that it became a generative synthesis of modernist visual language. 102 00:16:13,220 --> 00:16:18,470 Arabic Islamic calligraphy. And Black African design. 103 00:16:20,820 --> 00:16:29,100 The process for Salahi began with the inclusion of legible text in his compositions, 104 00:16:29,700 --> 00:16:37,110 followed by a progressive decomposition and reconstitution of the abstract calligraphic forms, 105 00:16:37,860 --> 00:16:46,560 the result of which was an experience that he has described as the opening of a mystical Pandora's box, 106 00:16:47,040 --> 00:17:00,420 from which emerged theory and tropes and human animal gowned skeletal figures with long mask like faces that populate his ethnic magic compositions. 107 00:17:02,580 --> 00:17:11,460 Moreover, the structural unravelling of the elegant, sacred scripts yielded bewildering, 108 00:17:11,490 --> 00:17:18,210 abstract and representational images rich with ritual and mystical symbolism. 109 00:17:20,330 --> 00:17:24,470 By 1964 in works such as. 110 00:17:29,390 --> 00:17:48,610 Embryo. The child and the bird, and they always appear composed of black and grey text, abstract shapes as well as morphic and spectral forms. 111 00:17:49,450 --> 00:17:59,530 He achieved the structural synthesis of the arabesque and formal position of calligraphic forms. 112 00:18:00,930 --> 00:18:09,810 An Indigenous metal crafts of the Southern Sudanese sun and man where two of the neighbouring Congo. 113 00:18:12,660 --> 00:18:23,940 It is as if his tactical detour to the calligraphic text an indigenous African design that is in the way he arrived at 114 00:18:23,940 --> 00:18:34,350 figuration based primarily on the calligraphic flourish and structural principles of the Arabic script resolved for him. 115 00:18:34,710 --> 00:18:44,490 That Post's late search for a visual language expressive of a Sudanese multicultural artistic identity. 116 00:18:46,380 --> 00:18:57,180 To this point, let us consider one of the most ubiquitous motifs in Salahi's work, and that is the crass centric form. 117 00:18:57,900 --> 00:19:05,310 To see how these new images conflate multiple cultural symbolisms. 118 00:19:08,620 --> 00:19:15,280 In Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams from 1961 to 65, 119 00:19:16,210 --> 00:19:33,580 populated by anthropomorphic as well as authentic shapes that we first saw in his 1960 figure with a head gear crowned by mounted cow horns. 120 00:19:34,750 --> 00:19:46,120 These same skull forms have ancient and contemporary resonances as they featured prominently in the royal burial practices. 121 00:19:47,810 --> 00:19:54,650 Of ancient Nubian kingdom of Kama to the north, as well as in the present day. 122 00:19:58,200 --> 00:20:03,480 Ceremonial attires of the Nuba of southern Sudan. 123 00:20:05,190 --> 00:20:14,550 In two other important work from the 1960s the vision of the tomb and the last sound. 124 00:20:15,390 --> 00:20:21,060 The argument I make here become, I believe, quite compelling for the era. 125 00:20:21,990 --> 00:20:33,120 There is no doubt that it is the same form of the cur my cows calls that have been stylised as crescents, 126 00:20:33,600 --> 00:20:44,580 surmounting the pile of broken abstract decorative shapes that might as well be fragments of calligraphic texts. 127 00:20:45,980 --> 00:20:49,280 But this same form also references the crescent moon. 128 00:20:49,970 --> 00:20:53,390 That ancient symbol of life's renewal. 129 00:20:55,690 --> 00:21:03,490 In 1967, Salahi noted in reference to a different work this painting and for pictorial police me. 130 00:21:04,770 --> 00:21:14,280 And I quote this donkey's face. He said, It looks to me like my own face and my father's face. 131 00:21:15,490 --> 00:21:20,680 It is the three together superimposed one upon the other. 132 00:21:21,980 --> 00:21:27,110 Sometimes it looks like me. And sometimes, like the moon. 133 00:21:28,130 --> 00:21:33,180 The new moon with horns. Sometimes it looks like a beast. 134 00:21:34,170 --> 00:21:44,650 Sometimes a human being. If I have dwelt at length on Salahi's post late formal experimentation, 135 00:21:44,980 --> 00:21:51,250 it is to highlight one of the key aspects of post-colonial modernist art and literature, 136 00:21:51,250 --> 00:21:59,979 which is the investment in the development of expressive language with which to articulate modern Africa's 137 00:21:59,980 --> 00:22:07,600 multiple heritages and identities even within the monolithic political imaginary of the new nation. 138 00:22:09,050 --> 00:22:21,830 The Sudanese poet and scholar Mohammed Abdul Hai might have been describing Salahi when in 1977 he said of the 1960 Sudanese poet, quote, 139 00:22:22,760 --> 00:22:29,270 He has been the cultural alchemist of the nation, a gatherer of buried roots, 140 00:22:29,900 --> 00:22:38,540 and like the black of Goldsmith, a maker of difficult images of the identity of the people, unquote. 141 00:22:40,880 --> 00:22:48,530 But we have to wonder what all of this had to do with the political realities of independent Sudan. 142 00:22:50,050 --> 00:22:50,890 At this time. 143 00:22:52,220 --> 00:23:02,950 What to put it differently was the politics of the Khartoum School and its rhetoric of artistic authenticity within the context of the new nation. 144 00:23:05,200 --> 00:23:09,380 To make sense of this, let us briefly consider Sudan's political history. 145 00:23:09,400 --> 00:23:19,530 During the independence decade. From the moment it won its political independence in 1956 from Britain and Egypt. 146 00:23:19,830 --> 00:23:23,760 No small thanks to the pressure from Muhammad Naguib. 147 00:23:25,000 --> 00:23:30,550 A co-leader of the Egyptian revolution, who himself was South Sudanese. 148 00:23:32,130 --> 00:23:35,820 The country was faced with deep crisis. 149 00:23:37,060 --> 00:23:41,530 Christian animist and indigenous groups in the South, 150 00:23:42,340 --> 00:23:49,060 fearful of domination by the majority Arab populations to the north, demanded political autonomy. 151 00:23:50,610 --> 00:23:57,540 Thus precipitating the first Civil War of 1955 to 1972. 152 00:23:58,940 --> 00:24:08,300 In between a 1958 coup ushered the military dictatorship of General Abbott in 1964, 153 00:24:08,750 --> 00:24:21,740 a popular revolution instigated by the killing of a Khartoum University student but led by the country's well-organised communists and abodes regime, 154 00:24:22,340 --> 00:24:30,560 followed by an interim period of contestation in the north among Islamist and Communist parties. 155 00:24:32,600 --> 00:24:44,750 Jaffar our memories, who in 1969 brought Sudan's restive independence decade to an end and witnessed his rise as an impactful, 156 00:24:45,080 --> 00:24:49,340 cruel and cunning military dictator and sovereign big man. 157 00:24:52,350 --> 00:24:55,800 Of course, the history is far more complicated than this. 158 00:24:57,040 --> 00:25:06,520 But the picture here is of a young nation born with congenital illness that had much to do with its great size. 159 00:25:07,120 --> 00:25:11,230 It was the largest country in Africa and the Middle East at the time. 160 00:25:11,770 --> 00:25:20,770 It complex ethnic and religious diversity and long standing, fraught relations between the Arab and black populations. 161 00:25:21,700 --> 00:25:30,880 It was a nation born into chronic civil war that in the first decade catalysed cycles of coups, 162 00:25:31,420 --> 00:25:36,820 a dictatorship revolution and fractious political structures. 163 00:25:38,490 --> 00:25:44,610 Given this, the question then is what role did art and artists played during this period, 164 00:25:45,330 --> 00:25:53,970 and how did the rhetoric of national culture and artistic identity championed by the cartoon school fit into this history? 165 00:25:57,250 --> 00:26:01,480 Wow. We must wait for more comprehensive research and studies. 166 00:26:01,960 --> 00:26:09,910 The work of the Sudanese artist and art historian Hassan Moussa has afforded us some pertinent information about this era. 167 00:26:11,290 --> 00:26:22,570 We know, for instance, that the Sudanese Plastic Artists Union presented an art exhibition in celebration of the national independence in 1956. 168 00:26:23,500 --> 00:26:34,450 And while we have no details about the content of the show, it is the editorial published in the newspaper Al-Ahram that is of interest to me. 169 00:26:37,240 --> 00:26:46,150 After noting that most of the art was bought up by the diplomats, expatriates and upper class Sudanese, 170 00:26:46,600 --> 00:26:56,410 it lamented, quote, The downtrodden visitors have welcomed the exhibition with this great sense of grief. 171 00:26:57,990 --> 00:27:04,960 Because of the expensive prices. Which we are not less than £5 per piece. 172 00:27:08,130 --> 00:27:15,150 As I suggested in my introductory lecture, we must wonder if the fact that fine arts, 173 00:27:15,150 --> 00:27:24,930 dependent on the elite and the state in Sudan and elsewhere, might explain not only its ability to clearly speak. 174 00:27:26,060 --> 00:27:36,290 Inability rather to clearly speak truth to power, but also its relative immunity from the big man's coercive power. 175 00:27:38,880 --> 00:27:45,090 For the reported grief of the downtrodden over the fact that the foreign and local 176 00:27:45,090 --> 00:27:53,640 elites went home with much of the artworks serves here as a metaphor for fine arts. 177 00:27:53,670 --> 00:28:03,320 Disconnect from the masses and its perception by the big men as an unlikely locus of popular revolt. 178 00:28:05,000 --> 00:28:12,530 In fact, the Abbott regime embraced art as an instrument for governmentality as it organised 179 00:28:12,530 --> 00:28:18,200 exhibitions meant to forge national identity and send cultural delegations to China. 180 00:28:18,770 --> 00:28:22,790 The Soviet Union, among many other friendly countries. 181 00:28:24,590 --> 00:28:25,670 In his memoir, 182 00:28:25,880 --> 00:28:40,910 Salahi recalls a trip to China during which he visited schools mandated to preserve national heritage by learning traditional modern methods and arts, 183 00:28:41,750 --> 00:28:47,630 and upon return, unsuccessfully tried to implement similar programs in Khartoum. 184 00:28:49,700 --> 00:28:57,200 After the 1964 revolution, the Sudanese Communist Party, a major player in national politics of that era, 185 00:28:57,860 --> 00:29:05,570 established the Association of Progressive Sudanese Writers and Artists known as Pediment. 186 00:29:07,420 --> 00:29:12,150 The three headed and four armed lion from ancient Marawi. 187 00:29:13,660 --> 00:29:21,670 Turning away from the city to the hinterlands, the epidemic group focussed its attention to a marxist, 188 00:29:21,670 --> 00:29:28,900 heavy program of popular culture in the service of a diverse national community riven by war. 189 00:29:31,450 --> 00:29:41,139 Two things to note. First, in calling for recognition of Sudan as a nation of many cultures and peoples and 190 00:29:41,140 --> 00:29:46,150 seeking a formal language with which to articulate this unity in diversity, 191 00:29:46,150 --> 00:29:51,640 which is a mantra in the government circles at a time by the Khartoum School. 192 00:29:53,680 --> 00:29:57,550 And it's a light school of the jungle and desert in literature. 193 00:29:58,120 --> 00:30:00,169 These, I think, were, in fact, 194 00:30:00,170 --> 00:30:12,850 an alignment with official national unity programs of both the first dictatorship and the post 1964 period of unstable democratic dispensation. 195 00:30:14,520 --> 00:30:22,710 And it is in this sense that I have argued that post-colonial modernism, alongside its commitment to formal experimentation, 196 00:30:23,370 --> 00:30:29,730 was fully aligned with cultural nationalism and decolonisation during the independence decade. 197 00:30:31,060 --> 00:30:39,870 Second. Salahi's 1960s work exemplified an advanced form of African modernist practice. 198 00:30:40,470 --> 00:30:53,190 Given the of this formal language and profundity of its alignment to the very ideas and ideologies around which is structurally weak and crisis prone, 199 00:30:53,190 --> 00:30:58,440 Sudan and its Khartoum elites imagined the nation. 200 00:31:01,510 --> 00:31:05,889 Despite this, there are moments in Salah, his early work and paintings, 201 00:31:05,890 --> 00:31:12,730 where we might get glimpses of his awareness of African and Sudanese post-colonial malaise. 202 00:31:14,780 --> 00:31:25,220 His self portrait of suffering of 1961, for instance, might come across as a statement about his own existential condition, 203 00:31:26,360 --> 00:31:31,370 but it more properly ought to be seen as his meditation on suffering itself. 204 00:31:32,060 --> 00:31:40,879 That is, the configuration of an experience shared not just by the downtrodden, referenced years before, 205 00:31:40,880 --> 00:31:48,260 by the iron editor, but also by the masses of Sudanese touched by the Civil War. 206 00:31:49,160 --> 00:31:49,700 In fact, 207 00:31:49,700 --> 00:32:00,410 I am tempted to see this work as Salahi's reflection on the psychic impact of post-independence Sudan's existential crisis on the national body. 208 00:32:01,870 --> 00:32:09,490 It is his portrait of Sudan and by extension, African post-colonial condition. 209 00:32:11,160 --> 00:32:21,240 Another painting funeral and the crescent of 1963 points to this continental dimension of Salahi's reflections. 210 00:32:22,570 --> 00:32:29,410 In this work, a group of naked people rendered in the figure of style he developed during this 211 00:32:29,410 --> 00:32:37,270 period hold aloft a horizontal dead body whose one hand drops at an angle, 212 00:32:37,990 --> 00:32:40,180 blocking the mouth of the tallest figure. 213 00:32:42,120 --> 00:32:51,390 Painted in response to the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese prime minister whose assassination marked. 214 00:32:53,710 --> 00:32:56,770 A low point in the country's nation building. 215 00:32:58,190 --> 00:33:02,450 But without any of the signification on that specific context, 216 00:33:02,840 --> 00:33:13,310 it might as well have been a commentary on the crisis prone, independent Congo, Sudan and Africa. 217 00:33:14,710 --> 00:33:22,390 Similarly, his victory of truths of 1962 depicting stylised figures with raised arms, 218 00:33:23,050 --> 00:33:33,640 was his statement of support for black South Africans protesting the apartheid past laws. 219 00:33:34,630 --> 00:33:45,820 Yet it is equally a universal statement about the primacy and power of truth as a moral principle underlying every fight against oppressive power. 220 00:33:46,900 --> 00:33:58,480 My point here is that as much as Salahi's work during the 1960s testify to the very idea of articulating national cultural identity, 221 00:33:58,930 --> 00:34:08,710 it sometimes served as prognostic commentary on the status and fate of sovereign Sudan and decolonising Africa. 222 00:34:09,160 --> 00:34:18,880 Buffeted by extreme political headwinds as they confronted the difficult task of nation building and sovereignty. 223 00:34:25,120 --> 00:34:38,710 On May 25, 1969, major Jaffa named Mary, along with a group of soldiers who call themselves like their Egyptian counterparts. 224 00:34:38,980 --> 00:34:45,040 Three officers overthrew the already stable, democratic government. 225 00:34:46,510 --> 00:34:56,920 He set up the Revolutionary Command Council that included members of the Communist Party to signal his sympathies with the political platform, 226 00:34:57,940 --> 00:35:02,200 but also promoted himself to Brigadier and prime minister. 227 00:35:03,610 --> 00:35:13,780 The RCC manifesto proclaimed as its mandate the return to power to the hands of the workers, 228 00:35:13,930 --> 00:35:21,610 peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, nationalist capitalists who are not associated with imperialism. 229 00:35:22,550 --> 00:35:32,350 Unquote. Predictably enamoured by this, the political left and intellectual elite joined the government. 230 00:35:33,610 --> 00:35:40,000 Even the Fine Arts Students Union in Khartoum endorsed the regime. 231 00:35:41,250 --> 00:35:45,060 And he returned the favour with a visit to the school in 1970, 232 00:35:45,480 --> 00:35:54,120 during which he extolled the role of art in national development and even promised to expand the art program. 233 00:35:56,000 --> 00:36:02,630 Those began a rather complicated relationship between contemporary artists and the regime. 234 00:36:04,840 --> 00:36:17,499 I'll return to this shortly. But in the meantime, nightmare quickly aligned with Egypt's Nasser and Libya's Gadhafi and pulled the 235 00:36:17,500 --> 00:36:24,190 Sudan into the Nasserist orbit with its brand of pan-Arab based popular socialism. 236 00:36:25,540 --> 00:36:38,170 But in 1971, two years into his rule, his former communist allies, unimpressed by the regime's shift away from a stridently Marxist orientation, 237 00:36:38,710 --> 00:36:46,330 funded a failed coup led by one of the three officers, Major Hashim attack. 238 00:36:48,010 --> 00:36:55,210 The response was a brutal crackdown and purging of Communist Party members. 239 00:36:55,900 --> 00:37:05,820 The dissolution of the RCC. An establishment of Sudanese social union as the country's only political party. 240 00:37:07,230 --> 00:37:20,280 A referendum that returned a stunning 99% approval for his obvious transformation to a military president of a one party state. 241 00:37:21,760 --> 00:37:30,960 Took place a year later. And bolstered by the result of this carefully orchestrated referendum nightmare, 242 00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:39,690 he began an ambitious nation building campaign reminiscent of that of his recently deceased mentor, Nasser. 243 00:37:41,040 --> 00:37:49,530 The immediate result of this was the Addis Ababa peace agreement between the North and the South, 244 00:37:50,070 --> 00:37:56,490 thus practically ending what was, until then, an intractable civil war. 245 00:37:58,160 --> 00:38:07,220 The South was granted greater autonomy with English as its official language and equal civil status guaranteed to all citizens, 246 00:38:07,550 --> 00:38:11,000 including black slaves in northern Sudan. 247 00:38:12,610 --> 00:38:19,870 Following this, he went on a southern charm offensive. 248 00:38:21,700 --> 00:38:31,970 Receiving wide support. On the international front and the American pull the country away from the Soviet sphere of influence, 249 00:38:33,020 --> 00:38:37,580 suspecting that they had a hand in the coup of the previous year. 250 00:38:38,750 --> 00:38:43,620 But connecting with China. And the Non-Aligned Movement. 251 00:38:44,980 --> 00:38:57,880 In 1976, however, a deadly coup d'état organised by the exiled Islamist politician Sadeq al-Mahdi rocked Sudan and the murderous regime. 252 00:38:59,910 --> 00:39:08,819 A reconciliation agreement with Marty the following year set off a shift by memory away 253 00:39:08,820 --> 00:39:15,900 from the Addis Ababa Agreement in favour of turning the country towards Islamist ideology. 254 00:39:17,510 --> 00:39:23,120 When in 1981 he fully embraced the Muslim Brotherhood. 255 00:39:23,120 --> 00:39:27,470 Check out of the garb. And in 1983. 256 00:39:29,330 --> 00:39:41,150 When he declared an Islamic revolution, tried and failed to declare himself the leader of Sudanese Muslims, 257 00:39:42,110 --> 00:39:47,930 imposed Islamic law throughout the country and abolished the Addis Ababa Accord. 258 00:39:48,920 --> 00:39:57,740 The south under John Garang formed the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, ushering in the second civil war. 259 00:39:59,880 --> 00:40:05,040 And the imagery bettered his political survival and the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. 260 00:40:06,620 --> 00:40:17,810 And with his Western Cold War backers, continued his anti-communist campaign while waging the Civil War. 261 00:40:19,460 --> 00:40:31,010 But when in 1985, the regime charged the maverick anti Shariah law, Islamic scholar and cleric and the leader of the Republican brothers. 262 00:40:32,860 --> 00:40:41,410 Mohamed Taha for what amounted to apostasy and summarily executed him in the same prison. 263 00:40:41,710 --> 00:40:49,950 Salah He will be detained in, by the way, and when in March of that same year on the advice of the IMF, 264 00:40:49,960 --> 00:40:53,470 and he may raise the price of food commodities. 265 00:40:54,900 --> 00:41:02,670 The Khartoum masses began protests that soon turned into a stifling nationwide political strike. 266 00:41:04,580 --> 00:41:12,680 In May. While this is in the US, a military takeover ended nightmarish his 16 year rule. 267 00:41:13,910 --> 00:41:29,050 He went into exile. I had earlier noted what I call the complicated relationship of art and artists with Niemeyer's dictatorship. 268 00:41:30,980 --> 00:41:40,670 After the initial romance between artists and students at the Fine Arts School and the Sudanese Plastic Arts Union, 269 00:41:41,750 --> 00:41:48,860 the post 1971 Purging of Communists and the proscription of the Sudanese Communist Party 270 00:41:49,370 --> 00:41:56,300 compelled a change of tactic among segments of the leftist groups and networks in Khartoum. 271 00:41:57,760 --> 00:42:06,940 Broadly, many of the post 1960s generation of artists were active members of the Communist Party and their affiliates, 272 00:42:07,480 --> 00:42:19,360 which meant that they had to navigate the fraught and dangerous path between the anti establishment political activities and official patronage. 273 00:42:20,690 --> 00:42:24,980 For instance, in 1975, former graduates of the School of Fine Arts. 274 00:42:26,360 --> 00:42:37,850 Communists and socialist partisans of the National Liberation Front established an anti-regime collective simply called Studio, 275 00:42:38,420 --> 00:42:50,210 but whose work focussed mostly on supporting underground networks of communists, activists, writers and artists and producing propaganda material. 276 00:42:51,390 --> 00:43:04,740 But it was the emergence in 1976 of the crystallised group led by the former Khartoum school member Kamala Ishaq and Muhammad Hamid Sadat, 277 00:43:05,490 --> 00:43:08,910 that shook up the Khartoum contemporary art scene. 278 00:43:10,420 --> 00:43:17,409 Their manifesto, published in the regime's Sudanese Social Socialist Union newspaper, 279 00:43:17,410 --> 00:43:28,180 Alam equally rejected the identity based work of the Khartoum School and the activist social practices of the communist and leftist artists. 280 00:43:29,330 --> 00:43:33,590 Instead, they avoided sociopolitical commentary, 281 00:43:34,460 --> 00:43:44,660 embraced the sort of conceptual and performative work making the rounds in New York and European metropolitan centres. 282 00:43:45,590 --> 00:43:52,430 All the while advancing what I think of as the befuddling theorised vision of the crystal. 283 00:43:54,570 --> 00:44:07,710 Besides calling on all artists to use the colour blue for its, quote, great potential in showing internal dimensions and debts and for its. 284 00:44:08,920 --> 00:44:12,700 Ability to create a crystallised vision. 285 00:44:14,510 --> 00:44:25,220 They also proclaim that, quote, truth is relative and absolute nature is dependent on man as a limited proposition, unquote. 286 00:44:27,920 --> 00:44:39,800 The same evasive. What play? Though steeped in Marxist rhetoric, pervades the writings of the crystallised antagonists. 287 00:44:41,530 --> 00:44:51,100 For instance, at the opening of his exhibition at the British Council in Khartoum in 1977, Ahmed Bola, 288 00:44:51,730 --> 00:45:00,270 a leading leftist artist, invited a child instead of the usual top government official as the guest of honour. 289 00:45:01,650 --> 00:45:12,360 Declaring that his work, quote, issue from a radical opposition to the institutions of cultural coercion against the 290 00:45:12,360 --> 00:45:21,030 legacy of productive criticism and against absence cloaked in icons instead of action. 291 00:45:24,240 --> 00:45:36,870 The picture, as I see it, is of a contemporary art scene distanced from the post-colonial cultural Sudanese and of the 1960s Khartoum School, 292 00:45:36,870 --> 00:45:48,180 but which still largely depended on official patronage and platforms to either engage in theory dense dissident work, 293 00:45:48,810 --> 00:46:00,630 as did the leftists, or in the list stridently apolitical practice meant for supposedly sophisticated art literati. 294 00:46:03,030 --> 00:46:11,940 While these contemporary artists might not have been tied to officialdom through the green Bergen umbilical cord of gold, 295 00:46:13,260 --> 00:46:20,430 they evidently found ingenious aesthetic practices and rhetorical pyrotechnics that the censors 296 00:46:20,430 --> 00:46:29,550 might have considered unintelligible or too fancy to constitute much of a threat to the regime. 297 00:46:30,930 --> 00:46:38,460 Perhaps it is the recognition of this fine arts political impotency. 298 00:46:39,470 --> 00:46:49,550 That some of the leftist artists, as Hassan Moussa informs us, instead focussed on cultural activist work, 299 00:46:50,240 --> 00:46:56,660 usually disseminated to the masses through publications, flyers and audiotapes. 300 00:46:58,920 --> 00:47:03,590 And it is that. That often got them into trouble. 301 00:47:06,390 --> 00:47:19,110 So where you might ask is Salahi and the and especially the prison drawings teased in the title of this lecture. 302 00:47:19,560 --> 00:47:20,460 In all of this. 303 00:47:24,530 --> 00:47:38,540 I ended the second part of this lecture with a discussion of his 1960s work produced between the first dictatorship and the second restive Republic. 304 00:47:39,080 --> 00:47:46,790 When he embarked on extensive UNESCO's sponsored travels through the Americas in 1962 305 00:47:47,480 --> 00:47:52,910 and a one year sojourn in the United States as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation. 306 00:47:54,420 --> 00:48:07,140 As I noted earlier, the 1969 coup and Memories regime was at the onset supported by the intellectual elite and the Communist Party. 307 00:48:08,370 --> 00:48:20,220 Many among the post-colonial modernists and their generation, perhaps still harbouring the dream of sovereign national culture, joined the government. 308 00:48:22,140 --> 00:48:32,860 For instance, Salahi was appointed. Assistant cultural attache at the Sudan Embassy in London. 309 00:48:33,730 --> 00:48:47,220 That same year that Emery came to power and in 1972, he was recalled to Khartoum to serve as undersecretary for culture. 310 00:48:49,470 --> 00:49:00,180 In that post. Among other things, he established the Khartoum Art Gallery, where the Hadad exhibition we saw earlier took place. 311 00:49:01,660 --> 00:49:07,660 And this was the first dedicated exhibition space in the city. 312 00:49:09,880 --> 00:49:26,740 But in all of that moment, his studio work was limited to small, largely abstract, colourful pen drawings, such as Man in Prayer of 1973. 313 00:49:29,680 --> 00:49:39,400 The September 1975 failed military coup upturned Salahi's until then functional relationship with the regime. 314 00:49:40,630 --> 00:49:47,230 Diverted the trajectory of his career and dramatically transformed his approach to image making. 315 00:49:49,160 --> 00:49:50,629 Days after the coup. 316 00:49:50,630 --> 00:50:03,680 While still serving as a prominent civil servant, Salahi was arrested and jailed simply because his cousin, an Army officer, led the coup plotters. 317 00:50:05,270 --> 00:50:17,180 But he was never charged. During the six months in Cooper Prison memories favourite home and killing ground for political opponents. 318 00:50:18,050 --> 00:50:30,650 Salahi spends some of his time drawing on pieces of paper salvaged from food, paper bags with pencils smuggled into the cells and shed by inmates. 319 00:50:32,420 --> 00:50:37,610 This was a dangerous act as rioting of any kind was prohibited. 320 00:50:38,900 --> 00:50:49,160 So he would tear the paper into small, indiscrete pieces and make drawings on each strip, continuing the composition in the next. 321 00:50:50,430 --> 00:51:04,230 And so on, producing a drawing out of necessity that grew organically without pre-planning across multiple purpose segments. 322 00:51:06,250 --> 00:51:09,310 This way. He avoided surveillance. 323 00:51:11,150 --> 00:51:16,550 Well until he was caught and remanded in solitary confinement. 324 00:51:19,360 --> 00:51:24,339 We have no record of these prison time drawings for Sala. 325 00:51:24,340 --> 00:51:31,300 He buried them for his own safety. But could not recover them when he was suddenly released. 326 00:51:32,530 --> 00:51:46,750 However, that modality of drawing born of an extreme jail condition resulted later in what I might call carceral, explicit cops. 327 00:51:47,830 --> 00:51:54,310 That is the multi-dimensional work exemplified by the inevitable. 328 00:51:56,710 --> 00:52:01,300 In the months that Salahi was in post-prison home detention, 329 00:52:02,290 --> 00:52:17,200 he produced 38 modestly scaled illustrated ink and wash drawings consisting of narrative images with diaristic calligraphic poems. 330 00:52:17,470 --> 00:52:24,620 Reflecting on his prison experience. He collected them into a note into the prison notebook. 331 00:52:24,800 --> 00:52:28,190 Now, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 332 00:52:30,360 --> 00:52:38,310 Diverse in subject matter. Many of the drawings comment on the prison environment and its brutal jailers. 333 00:52:39,450 --> 00:52:43,259 The deplorable living conditions. The prisoners. 334 00:52:43,260 --> 00:52:46,560 Psychological degradation and mental anguish. 335 00:52:47,860 --> 00:52:50,860 And the power of hope and yearning for freedom. 336 00:52:52,880 --> 00:53:05,300 One of the more unusual and most realistic of the drawings shows a bird's eye view of a section of the prison compound. 337 00:53:05,600 --> 00:53:10,070 A panoptic perspective impossible for any prisoner. 338 00:53:11,760 --> 00:53:16,620 The clean geometry of the space, the terms lines convey. 339 00:53:16,980 --> 00:53:23,970 I think this pattern severity of prison as a functional carceral machine. 340 00:53:25,580 --> 00:53:30,050 We see to the upper left. It all. 341 00:53:31,330 --> 00:53:35,500 That might be the entrance depicted in another drawing. 342 00:53:37,820 --> 00:53:49,250 But here the structure of the door, along with the cubicle spaces inside of which are a range of facial types and decorative motifs. 343 00:53:50,310 --> 00:53:54,480 Becomes a snag. The key for prison as an institution. 344 00:53:56,070 --> 00:54:07,200 But paint above the door is a text painted on the original prison door that recalls the morbid. 345 00:54:08,640 --> 00:54:13,020 Humour of the Nazi concentration camps. 346 00:54:16,020 --> 00:54:27,570 In yet another drawing, a talented mechanical bird bound to a locking device is fashioned as a happiness factory. 347 00:54:28,540 --> 00:54:39,580 Despite that, its utterance reveals it as a signifier of tyrannical power and its technologies of propaganda. 348 00:54:42,740 --> 00:54:53,180 Other drawings described in word and images, the physical abuse levied by humourless military jailers, 349 00:54:54,800 --> 00:55:04,310 some cells fortified with supposedly protective charms for whom the inmates torture 350 00:55:04,460 --> 00:55:12,470 served as psychedelic balm for their own wretched lives under the Marsalis regime. 351 00:55:14,190 --> 00:55:25,230 Indeed the wow. A drawing in prison was Salahi's survival tactic. 352 00:55:27,120 --> 00:55:28,560 It wasn't the only. 353 00:55:30,060 --> 00:55:42,990 He devised other techniques of defiant hope, including meditative dialogues with the freedom bird and reflections on the power of religious faith. 354 00:55:43,980 --> 00:55:53,250 But he also planted an onion in the sand, the earth near his cell, and protected it against all odds. 355 00:55:53,250 --> 00:56:01,940 To see it grow and serve as the only spot of green in the dreary grey prison life. 356 00:56:04,380 --> 00:56:08,140 That onion. Memorialised, 357 00:56:08,570 --> 00:56:17,330 perhaps in the most poetic drawing in the prison notebook and rendered with such lyrical sensitivity 358 00:56:17,330 --> 00:56:26,180 and care that we can only see the original act of planting as an insistent act of faith. 359 00:56:26,750 --> 00:56:34,250 In this turban, power and triumph of life, even under the extreme conditions of the carceral state. 360 00:56:36,240 --> 00:56:46,530 In all these drawings focussed as they are on the specificities of prison life, the sovereign big man looms in the background, 361 00:56:47,520 --> 00:57:03,690 signified in the nasty jailors the humiliating and punishing routines, but also in the terrifying mechanical and malevolent birds and monsters. 362 00:57:06,130 --> 00:57:15,580 These are moreover Salahi's meditations on his extreme rather experience of another part of the repressive world 363 00:57:15,580 --> 00:57:24,310 built by the new military regime whose national culture programs Salahi helped to define for half a decade. 364 00:57:28,200 --> 00:57:42,419 But let me end by returning to the inevitable, which which I began to note its connection to Salahi's post-prison drawings on Live in the Sudan. 365 00:57:42,420 --> 00:57:49,860 In 1977, he moved to Qatar, and where he began ink on paper works. 366 00:57:50,250 --> 00:57:59,670 He would call black and white paintings, but composed like the organic prison drawings of multiple pieces of paper. 367 00:58:00,900 --> 00:58:09,870 He then settled in London in 1982 with brief returns to the Sudan and his short term appointment in Somalia a few years later. 368 00:58:10,800 --> 00:58:15,630 All the while continuing to explore this mode of image making. 369 00:58:16,440 --> 00:58:25,980 But whereas prison life necessitated the practice, it now offered him unprecedented, imaginative freedom. 370 00:58:27,090 --> 00:58:33,270 While the prison drawings serve to propel his spirit beyond the militarised confines of jail. 371 00:58:34,110 --> 00:58:35,250 Once free, 372 00:58:35,970 --> 00:58:47,850 he translated that into a formal tactic for generating pictorial forms and ideas that the finite space of a single picture frame can not restrain. 373 00:58:49,990 --> 00:59:04,660 Even so, the inevitable and similar works of this period reprise the inventive formalism of the 1960s analytical experiments with a calligraphic form, 374 00:59:05,170 --> 00:59:20,300 an African design. And given that it produced, it was produced around the same time he served as UNESCO's official in an already crisis riven Somalia. 375 00:59:20,870 --> 00:59:30,920 But also in the period that witnessed the rise of anti-apartheid mass resistance movement in South Africa. 376 00:59:31,790 --> 00:59:38,090 I am convinced that this is Salahi's summation. 377 00:59:39,030 --> 00:59:53,390 Of his faith. In the inevitability of freedom and victory for the long suffering peoples of the Sudan and Africa held down by big men in power. 378 00:59:54,860 --> 00:59:55,340 Thank you.