Good evening. So in my lecture today, I wish to take us to the Sudan, where between 1969 and 1985, it was ruled by.
The military dictator General Jaafar al-Marri, through cycles of civil war,
modernisation and nationalisation programs and purges of political opponents.
Within this context, I examined the calligraphic figuration of Ibrahim el Salahi, the country's leading modernist and one time political prisoner.
By juxtaposing Salahi's work to those of other Sudanese artists and in view of contemporary
debates on the role of art in a nation seized by the turbulent whims of a sovereign big man,
I propose that the sophisticated formalism of his drawings,
including his series he created soon after imprisonment, constituted a meditative commentary.
On a dictatorship that survived by stoking religious and ethnic crisis and systematic suppression of all opinions.
But let me acknowledge two people who helped me along my journey.
From Nigeria to the art world. First is Simon Altenburg,
who supported my graduate education in the United States after I was dismissed from soccer in the mid 1990s by the universities.
Small letter. Big man acting for the then military dictator.
Thanks to Simon, I finished my Masters in Art History before proceeding to Emory for my doctoral studies.
Second is the artist Amy Ableman, a classmate at Tampa who with her family,
provided me an emotional home during those years and sponsored the production of my master's thesis.
For this, I am eternally grateful to Simon and any.
And with that, I turn to today's topic.
Ibrahim al Salah. He. Produced in nine panel mural scale drawing.
That is, by every measure, a tour de force of draughtsmanship and design.
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.
The orchestral organisation of negative and positive space and intrepid control of line as a
trail or boundary of space and shapes in this work surprised the viewer by showing so much,
yet revealing even less.
Across the nine panels forms, lines, shapes concentrate into areas of decorative and tonal excess and then suddenly disappear,
leaving areas of silence and emptiness so complete loaded and of equal compositional weight as the blackest of passages.
Yet Salahi somehow manages to not use ink washes to achieve the work's strong tonal range.
Instead, he painstakingly laboured over the paper surface with single, precise lines,
layering them over each other until he achieved the tonal gradations,
structuring the composition from the light grey shaped elements to the pitch black zones that produced the formal symphonies breaking into,
streaking across, and binding the rigid boundaries of the work's constitutive panels.
He calls this mode of image making black and white painting.
As we relish in the festival of organic and geometric line, shape and form,
our eyes roll compelling as much or compelled as much by the pleasure of looking as
by the need to extricate from the dizzying composition human forms trapped within.
Wherever our gaze commences, it emphatically returns to the top centre panel, dominated by a powerful hand,
with clenched fist displays at a 45 degree angle toward the left, alongside a geometric blade like form partially hiding.
What might be a stylised human head.
Despite a continuation of lines and forms from this torso to the surrounding panels, they all break into tonal abstraction.
On further inspection. We barely recognise five other heads and faces and possibly is a morphic mask all within the three meet horizontal panels.
For all these heads and torsos, there are only three visible.
An exquisitely drawn hands and four feet, two clearly belonging to the one full figure in the entire composition,
standing upright and motionless to the left.
In fact, this lone faced figure, his body seemingly built or perhaps hidden under mechanical armour,
top and floral patterned sweeping skirt, serves as a static wedge against the overall dynamic leftward thrust of the entire composition.
But what do we make of the body fragments and the orgiastic forms of the sudden and
illogical turns from moments of cognition to species of to incomprehensibility?
And why is this work titled The Inevitable?
This last question takes us back to the and raised fist.
One of the most recognisable symbols of mass action, people's power, collective resistance and revolutionary movements.
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.
He must have been thinking about or perhaps willing, a specific outcome of ongoing political turmoil in the Sudan.
And it is often remarked that the word is his response to the mass strikes that erupted
in Khartoum in early April 1985 that some have called the second Sudanese revolution.
However, given that Salahi started this war perhaps months before these events, I will argue that its meaning goes beyond this specific event.
I shall return to this work towards the end of today's lecture.
But together, let us take a longer view of the political and art history that led to the revolutionary
days of April 1985 and the making of arguably the most important work by El Salahi.
In my introductory lecture, I noted the difference in outlook and objectives between the 1950s and sixties generation
of African post-colonial modernists and contemporary artists of the subsequent decades.
Despite recognising the preponderant distinction between the identity and national
culture focussed inquiry of the modernists and the contemporary artists.
Critical reflection on the continent's postcolonial condition.
I also noted that there are artists such as Gadsby's Siri who we have seen before, and Salahi,
whose careers unfolded across the conceptual and temporal boundaries of the modern and the contemporary.
Salahi's work. I also participated in the production and articulation of modernist national cultures of the sixties that followed in the
1970s and eighties by the critical examination of the post-colonial condition based on his experience in the Mary's Sudan.
What is beyond doubt, however,
is the profundity of his dedication to registers of artistic practice and discourse at different moments in his long career.
Indeed, I will be suggesting that the full appreciation of the formal uniqueness and conceptual substantiality
of his present drawings and other works that emerged from his incarceration by the Marin regime,
including the inevitable, is impossible without connecting them to his earlier, formal experimentation inspired by the modernist cultural nationalism.
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.
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,
led by Osman Rockefeller. Mohamed Ibrahim.
Kamala Ishaq and Salahi. As leaders of Sudanese postcolonial modernism.
Their work was based on the recognition of the country's complex blend of Arab and black African histories, cultures and traditions.
But a key focus of their work was on the foundational importance of the Arabic calligraphic text in their pictorial and formal language.
Whereas Wakil and she brain emphasised the sufficiency of the Arabic text as the resource for their pictorial experimentation.
Salahi was more invested in the broader context of Sudanese national identity,
which for him and his contemporaries in literature associated with the so-called jungle and desert school.
Must contend with the cultures of Arab and Islamic north and of southern black Sudan.
Reflecting this understanding of Sudan as a meeting point of cultures in the constitution of the country's post-independence national identity.
Salah Ahmed Ibrahim, a member of the Jungle and Desert School,
wrote in his 1958 poetry collection, The Ebony Forest, quote, Liar is he who proclaims I am.
They are mixed. The pure pedigree.
The only. Yes. Elia.
While Salahi came to the same conclusion about his artistic identity when, for instance,
in 1967, he echoed the poet by asserting, I am a mixture of Negro and Arab.
Well, it did not come easy. Four while a student at the Slade.
In the era of Sir William Coldstream, he was fully immersed in the figurative modernism of the British post-war era.
But on his return to the Sudan in 1957, one year after the country's political independence,
Salahi organised an exhibition of his late work in Khartoum.
But confronted by the cold reception of the work by his own people.
He returned to the studio and travelled through the Sudan, burdened by a crisis of relevance in his home country.
He sought out local artistic resources with which to reinvent his work, settling on Arabic calligraphy,
but also on diverse folk art and design, including metalwork and basketry.
But he also studied West African and ancient Nubian ritual and sculptural traditions, all of which contributed.
So the radical transformation that occurred in his work around 1960.
What is clear then is that his immersion in the ideological and existential space of postcolonial Sudan compelled
him to realign and refocus his work so that it became a generative synthesis of modernist visual language.
Arabic Islamic calligraphy. And Black African design.
The process for Salahi began with the inclusion of legible text in his compositions,
followed by a progressive decomposition and reconstitution of the abstract calligraphic forms,
the result of which was an experience that he has described as the opening of a mystical Pandora's box,
from which emerged theory and tropes and human animal gowned skeletal figures with long mask like faces that populate his ethnic magic compositions.
Moreover, the structural unravelling of the elegant, sacred scripts yielded bewildering,
abstract and representational images rich with ritual and mystical symbolism.
By 1964 in works such as.
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.
He achieved the structural synthesis of the arabesque and formal position of calligraphic forms.
An Indigenous metal crafts of the Southern Sudanese sun and man where two of the neighbouring Congo.
It is as if his tactical detour to the calligraphic text an indigenous African design that is in the way he arrived at
figuration based primarily on the calligraphic flourish and structural principles of the Arabic script resolved for him.
That Post's late search for a visual language expressive of a Sudanese multicultural artistic identity.
To this point, let us consider one of the most ubiquitous motifs in Salahi's work, and that is the crass centric form.
To see how these new images conflate multiple cultural symbolisms.
In Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams from 1961 to 65,
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.
These same skull forms have ancient and contemporary resonances as they featured prominently in the royal burial practices.
Of ancient Nubian kingdom of Kama to the north, as well as in the present day.
Ceremonial attires of the Nuba of southern Sudan.
In two other important work from the 1960s the vision of the tomb and the last sound.
The argument I make here become, I believe, quite compelling for the era.
There is no doubt that it is the same form of the cur my cows calls that have been stylised as crescents,
surmounting the pile of broken abstract decorative shapes that might as well be fragments of calligraphic texts.
But this same form also references the crescent moon.
That ancient symbol of life's renewal.
In 1967, Salahi noted in reference to a different work this painting and for pictorial police me.
And I quote this donkey's face. He said, It looks to me like my own face and my father's face.
It is the three together superimposed one upon the other.
Sometimes it looks like me. And sometimes, like the moon.
The new moon with horns. Sometimes it looks like a beast.
Sometimes a human being. If I have dwelt at length on Salahi's post late formal experimentation,
it is to highlight one of the key aspects of post-colonial modernist art and literature,
which is the investment in the development of expressive language with which to articulate modern Africa's
multiple heritages and identities even within the monolithic political imaginary of the new nation.
The Sudanese poet and scholar Mohammed Abdul Hai might have been describing Salahi when in 1977 he said of the 1960 Sudanese poet, quote,
He has been the cultural alchemist of the nation, a gatherer of buried roots,
and like the black of Goldsmith, a maker of difficult images of the identity of the people, unquote.
But we have to wonder what all of this had to do with the political realities of independent Sudan.
At this time.
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.
To make sense of this, let us briefly consider Sudan's political history.
During the independence decade. From the moment it won its political independence in 1956 from Britain and Egypt.
No small thanks to the pressure from Muhammad Naguib.
A co-leader of the Egyptian revolution, who himself was South Sudanese.
The country was faced with deep crisis.
Christian animist and indigenous groups in the South,
fearful of domination by the majority Arab populations to the north, demanded political autonomy.
Thus precipitating the first Civil War of 1955 to 1972.
In between a 1958 coup ushered the military dictatorship of General Abbott in 1964,
a popular revolution instigated by the killing of a Khartoum University student but led by the country's well-organised communists and abodes regime,
followed by an interim period of contestation in the north among Islamist and Communist parties.
Jaffar our memories, who in 1969 brought Sudan's restive independence decade to an end and witnessed his rise as an impactful,
cruel and cunning military dictator and sovereign big man.
Of course, the history is far more complicated than this.
But the picture here is of a young nation born with congenital illness that had much to do with its great size.
It was the largest country in Africa and the Middle East at the time.
It complex ethnic and religious diversity and long standing, fraught relations between the Arab and black populations.
It was a nation born into chronic civil war that in the first decade catalysed cycles of coups,
a dictatorship revolution and fractious political structures.
Given this, the question then is what role did art and artists played during this period,
and how did the rhetoric of national culture and artistic identity championed by the cartoon school fit into this history?
Wow. We must wait for more comprehensive research and studies.
The work of the Sudanese artist and art historian Hassan Moussa has afforded us some pertinent information about this era.
We know, for instance, that the Sudanese Plastic Artists Union presented an art exhibition in celebration of the national independence in 1956.
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.
After noting that most of the art was bought up by the diplomats, expatriates and upper class Sudanese,
it lamented, quote, The downtrodden visitors have welcomed the exhibition with this great sense of grief.
Because of the expensive prices. Which we are not less than £5 per piece.
As I suggested in my introductory lecture, we must wonder if the fact that fine arts,
dependent on the elite and the state in Sudan and elsewhere, might explain not only its ability to clearly speak.
Inability rather to clearly speak truth to power, but also its relative immunity from the big man's coercive power.
For the reported grief of the downtrodden over the fact that the foreign and local
elites went home with much of the artworks serves here as a metaphor for fine arts.
Disconnect from the masses and its perception by the big men as an unlikely locus of popular revolt.
In fact, the Abbott regime embraced art as an instrument for governmentality as it organised
exhibitions meant to forge national identity and send cultural delegations to China.
The Soviet Union, among many other friendly countries.
In his memoir,
Salahi recalls a trip to China during which he visited schools mandated to preserve national heritage by learning traditional modern methods and arts,
and upon return, unsuccessfully tried to implement similar programs in Khartoum.
After the 1964 revolution, the Sudanese Communist Party, a major player in national politics of that era,
established the Association of Progressive Sudanese Writers and Artists known as Pediment.
The three headed and four armed lion from ancient Marawi.
Turning away from the city to the hinterlands, the epidemic group focussed its attention to a marxist,
heavy program of popular culture in the service of a diverse national community riven by war.
Two things to note. First, in calling for recognition of Sudan as a nation of many cultures and peoples and
seeking a formal language with which to articulate this unity in diversity,
which is a mantra in the government circles at a time by the Khartoum School.
And it's a light school of the jungle and desert in literature.
These, I think, were, in fact,
an alignment with official national unity programs of both the first dictatorship and the post 1964 period of unstable democratic dispensation.
And it is in this sense that I have argued that post-colonial modernism, alongside its commitment to formal experimentation,
was fully aligned with cultural nationalism and decolonisation during the independence decade.
Second. Salahi's 1960s work exemplified an advanced form of African modernist practice.
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,
Sudan and its Khartoum elites imagined the nation.
Despite this, there are moments in Salah, his early work and paintings,
where we might get glimpses of his awareness of African and Sudanese post-colonial malaise.
His self portrait of suffering of 1961, for instance, might come across as a statement about his own existential condition,
but it more properly ought to be seen as his meditation on suffering itself.
That is, the configuration of an experience shared not just by the downtrodden, referenced years before,
by the iron editor, but also by the masses of Sudanese touched by the Civil War.
In fact,
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.
It is his portrait of Sudan and by extension, African post-colonial condition.
Another painting funeral and the crescent of 1963 points to this continental dimension of Salahi's reflections.
In this work, a group of naked people rendered in the figure of style he developed during this
period hold aloft a horizontal dead body whose one hand drops at an angle,
blocking the mouth of the tallest figure.
Painted in response to the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese prime minister whose assassination marked.
A low point in the country's nation building.
But without any of the signification on that specific context,
it might as well have been a commentary on the crisis prone, independent Congo, Sudan and Africa.
Similarly, his victory of truths of 1962 depicting stylised figures with raised arms,
was his statement of support for black South Africans protesting the apartheid past laws.
Yet it is equally a universal statement about the primacy and power of truth as a moral principle underlying every fight against oppressive power.
My point here is that as much as Salahi's work during the 1960s testify to the very idea of articulating national cultural identity,
it sometimes served as prognostic commentary on the status and fate of sovereign Sudan and decolonising Africa.
Buffeted by extreme political headwinds as they confronted the difficult task of nation building and sovereignty.
On May 25, 1969, major Jaffa named Mary, along with a group of soldiers who call themselves like their Egyptian counterparts.
Three officers overthrew the already stable, democratic government.
He set up the Revolutionary Command Council that included members of the Communist Party to signal his sympathies with the political platform,
but also promoted himself to Brigadier and prime minister.
The RCC manifesto proclaimed as its mandate the return to power to the hands of the workers,
peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, nationalist capitalists who are not associated with imperialism.
Unquote. Predictably enamoured by this, the political left and intellectual elite joined the government.
Even the Fine Arts Students Union in Khartoum endorsed the regime.
And he returned the favour with a visit to the school in 1970,
during which he extolled the role of art in national development and even promised to expand the art program.
Those began a rather complicated relationship between contemporary artists and the regime.
I'll return to this shortly. But in the meantime, nightmare quickly aligned with Egypt's Nasser and Libya's Gadhafi and pulled the
Sudan into the Nasserist orbit with its brand of pan-Arab based popular socialism.
But in 1971, two years into his rule, his former communist allies, unimpressed by the regime's shift away from a stridently Marxist orientation,
funded a failed coup led by one of the three officers, Major Hashim attack.
The response was a brutal crackdown and purging of Communist Party members.
The dissolution of the RCC. An establishment of Sudanese social union as the country's only political party.
A referendum that returned a stunning 99% approval for his obvious transformation to a military president of a one party state.
Took place a year later. And bolstered by the result of this carefully orchestrated referendum nightmare,
he began an ambitious nation building campaign reminiscent of that of his recently deceased mentor, Nasser.
The immediate result of this was the Addis Ababa peace agreement between the North and the South,
thus practically ending what was, until then, an intractable civil war.
The South was granted greater autonomy with English as its official language and equal civil status guaranteed to all citizens,
including black slaves in northern Sudan.
Following this, he went on a southern charm offensive.
Receiving wide support. On the international front and the American pull the country away from the Soviet sphere of influence,
suspecting that they had a hand in the coup of the previous year.
But connecting with China. And the Non-Aligned Movement.
In 1976, however, a deadly coup d'état organised by the exiled Islamist politician Sadeq al-Mahdi rocked Sudan and the murderous regime.
A reconciliation agreement with Marty the following year set off a shift by memory away
from the Addis Ababa Agreement in favour of turning the country towards Islamist ideology.
When in 1981 he fully embraced the Muslim Brotherhood.
Check out of the garb. And in 1983.
When he declared an Islamic revolution, tried and failed to declare himself the leader of Sudanese Muslims,
imposed Islamic law throughout the country and abolished the Addis Ababa Accord.
The south under John Garang formed the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, ushering in the second civil war.
And the imagery bettered his political survival and the support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And with his Western Cold War backers, continued his anti-communist campaign while waging the Civil War.
But when in 1985, the regime charged the maverick anti Shariah law, Islamic scholar and cleric and the leader of the Republican brothers.
Mohamed Taha for what amounted to apostasy and summarily executed him in the same prison.
Salah He will be detained in, by the way, and when in March of that same year on the advice of the IMF,
and he may raise the price of food commodities.
The Khartoum masses began protests that soon turned into a stifling nationwide political strike.
In May. While this is in the US, a military takeover ended nightmarish his 16 year rule.
He went into exile. I had earlier noted what I call the complicated relationship of art and artists with Niemeyer's dictatorship.
After the initial romance between artists and students at the Fine Arts School and the Sudanese Plastic Arts Union,
the post 1971 Purging of Communists and the proscription of the Sudanese Communist Party
compelled a change of tactic among segments of the leftist groups and networks in Khartoum.
Broadly, many of the post 1960s generation of artists were active members of the Communist Party and their affiliates,
which meant that they had to navigate the fraught and dangerous path between the anti establishment political activities and official patronage.
For instance, in 1975, former graduates of the School of Fine Arts.
Communists and socialist partisans of the National Liberation Front established an anti-regime collective simply called Studio,
but whose work focussed mostly on supporting underground networks of communists, activists, writers and artists and producing propaganda material.
But it was the emergence in 1976 of the crystallised group led by the former Khartoum school member Kamala Ishaq and Muhammad Hamid Sadat,
that shook up the Khartoum contemporary art scene.
Their manifesto, published in the regime's Sudanese Social Socialist Union newspaper,
Alam equally rejected the identity based work of the Khartoum School and the activist social practices of the communist and leftist artists.
Instead, they avoided sociopolitical commentary,
embraced the sort of conceptual and performative work making the rounds in New York and European metropolitan centres.
All the while advancing what I think of as the befuddling theorised vision of the crystal.
Besides calling on all artists to use the colour blue for its, quote, great potential in showing internal dimensions and debts and for its.
Ability to create a crystallised vision.
They also proclaim that, quote, truth is relative and absolute nature is dependent on man as a limited proposition, unquote.
The same evasive. What play? Though steeped in Marxist rhetoric, pervades the writings of the crystallised antagonists.
For instance, at the opening of his exhibition at the British Council in Khartoum in 1977, Ahmed Bola,
a leading leftist artist, invited a child instead of the usual top government official as the guest of honour.
Declaring that his work, quote, issue from a radical opposition to the institutions of cultural coercion against the
legacy of productive criticism and against absence cloaked in icons instead of action.
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,
but which still largely depended on official patronage and platforms to either engage in theory dense dissident work,
as did the leftists, or in the list stridently apolitical practice meant for supposedly sophisticated art literati.
While these contemporary artists might not have been tied to officialdom through the green Bergen umbilical cord of gold,
they evidently found ingenious aesthetic practices and rhetorical pyrotechnics that the censors
might have considered unintelligible or too fancy to constitute much of a threat to the regime.
Perhaps it is the recognition of this fine arts political impotency.
That some of the leftist artists, as Hassan Moussa informs us, instead focussed on cultural activist work,
usually disseminated to the masses through publications, flyers and audiotapes.
And it is that. That often got them into trouble.
So where you might ask is Salahi and the and especially the prison drawings teased in the title of this lecture.
In all of this.
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.
When he embarked on extensive UNESCO's sponsored travels through the Americas in 1962
and a one year sojourn in the United States as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation.
As I noted earlier, the 1969 coup and Memories regime was at the onset supported by the intellectual elite and the Communist Party.
Many among the post-colonial modernists and their generation, perhaps still harbouring the dream of sovereign national culture, joined the government.
For instance, Salahi was appointed. Assistant cultural attache at the Sudan Embassy in London.
That same year that Emery came to power and in 1972, he was recalled to Khartoum to serve as undersecretary for culture.
In that post. Among other things, he established the Khartoum Art Gallery, where the Hadad exhibition we saw earlier took place.
And this was the first dedicated exhibition space in the city.
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.
The September 1975 failed military coup upturned Salahi's until then functional relationship with the regime.
Diverted the trajectory of his career and dramatically transformed his approach to image making.
Days after the coup.
While still serving as a prominent civil servant, Salahi was arrested and jailed simply because his cousin, an Army officer, led the coup plotters.
But he was never charged. During the six months in Cooper Prison memories favourite home and killing ground for political opponents.
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.
This was a dangerous act as rioting of any kind was prohibited.
So he would tear the paper into small, indiscrete pieces and make drawings on each strip, continuing the composition in the next.
And so on, producing a drawing out of necessity that grew organically without pre-planning across multiple purpose segments.
This way. He avoided surveillance.
Well until he was caught and remanded in solitary confinement.
We have no record of these prison time drawings for Sala.
He buried them for his own safety. But could not recover them when he was suddenly released.
However, that modality of drawing born of an extreme jail condition resulted later in what I might call carceral, explicit cops.
That is the multi-dimensional work exemplified by the inevitable.
In the months that Salahi was in post-prison home detention,
he produced 38 modestly scaled illustrated ink and wash drawings consisting of narrative images with diaristic calligraphic poems.
Reflecting on his prison experience. He collected them into a note into the prison notebook.
Now, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Diverse in subject matter. Many of the drawings comment on the prison environment and its brutal jailers.
The deplorable living conditions. The prisoners.
Psychological degradation and mental anguish.
And the power of hope and yearning for freedom.
One of the more unusual and most realistic of the drawings shows a bird's eye view of a section of the prison compound.
A panoptic perspective impossible for any prisoner.
The clean geometry of the space, the terms lines convey.
I think this pattern severity of prison as a functional carceral machine.
We see to the upper left. It all.
That might be the entrance depicted in another drawing.
But here the structure of the door, along with the cubicle spaces inside of which are a range of facial types and decorative motifs.
Becomes a snag. The key for prison as an institution.
But paint above the door is a text painted on the original prison door that recalls the morbid.
Humour of the Nazi concentration camps.
In yet another drawing, a talented mechanical bird bound to a locking device is fashioned as a happiness factory.
Despite that, its utterance reveals it as a signifier of tyrannical power and its technologies of propaganda.
Other drawings described in word and images, the physical abuse levied by humourless military jailers,
some cells fortified with supposedly protective charms for whom the inmates torture
served as psychedelic balm for their own wretched lives under the Marsalis regime.
Indeed the wow. A drawing in prison was Salahi's survival tactic.
It wasn't the only.
He devised other techniques of defiant hope, including meditative dialogues with the freedom bird and reflections on the power of religious faith.
But he also planted an onion in the sand, the earth near his cell, and protected it against all odds.
To see it grow and serve as the only spot of green in the dreary grey prison life.
That onion. Memorialised,
perhaps in the most poetic drawing in the prison notebook and rendered with such lyrical sensitivity
and care that we can only see the original act of planting as an insistent act of faith.
In this turban, power and triumph of life, even under the extreme conditions of the carceral state.
In all these drawings focussed as they are on the specificities of prison life, the sovereign big man looms in the background,
signified in the nasty jailors the humiliating and punishing routines, but also in the terrifying mechanical and malevolent birds and monsters.
These are moreover Salahi's meditations on his extreme rather experience of another part of the repressive world
built by the new military regime whose national culture programs Salahi helped to define for half a decade.
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.
In 1977, he moved to Qatar, and where he began ink on paper works.
He would call black and white paintings, but composed like the organic prison drawings of multiple pieces of paper.
He then settled in London in 1982 with brief returns to the Sudan and his short term appointment in Somalia a few years later.
All the while continuing to explore this mode of image making.
But whereas prison life necessitated the practice, it now offered him unprecedented, imaginative freedom.
While the prison drawings serve to propel his spirit beyond the militarised confines of jail.
Once free,
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.
Even so, the inevitable and similar works of this period reprise the inventive formalism of the 1960s analytical experiments with a calligraphic form,
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.
But also in the period that witnessed the rise of anti-apartheid mass resistance movement in South Africa.
I am convinced that this is Salahi's summation.
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.
Thank you.