The Forest and Desert School Revisited: Circle Art Gallery
Founded by the writers Muhammed Al-Makki Ibraheem, Al Nour Abbakar and Muhammed Abdel Hai, the school’s primary concern ‘was the cultural identity of the Northern Sudan and the North Sudanese individual’. The intention of the ‘Forest’ element was meant to symbolize ‘‘The African cultural constituent in North Sudanese cultural identity and the ‘Desert’ its Arab counterpart’’ . This conceived Northern Sudanese society as an African-Arab hybrid and ‘looked at Sudanese identity through a bilateral Arab & African culture’. A further reading suggests the creation of identity derived from connecting landscapes and ecosystems of different biomes from specific geographies that go beyond borders. This ascribes an environmental identity of what is considered ‘‘African’’ or ‘‘Arab’’ through a lens that traverses national, regional and local boundaries. However, this understanding also simplifies different ideas of ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ identity formations that flow across interconnected biomes, territories and continents particularly looking at artistic practices that engage elements of forests and deserts in their literal and figurative forms that offer articulations of identity beyond Sudan but in conversation with the school.
Working from the poetic synthesis of the school the exhibition engages with the ideas of the association of ‘‘Forest’’ as ‘‘African’’ and ‘‘Desert’’ as an ‘‘Arab’’ element within modern and Contemporary Art today without accepting this dual distinction as a given. This sees the affirmation, contradictory and intermingling of these ideas through figurative, abstract and conceptual works. The Crystalist’s articulation of transparency in poetry as ‘an ability to see the entire world in a grain of sand’, sand [Man’s four dimensional vision (William Blake)] becomes the scale of understanding the poetics of the exhibition, in relation to those influenced by the Khartoum School and a younger generation of artists shaping a contemporary engagement with the landscapes they traverse as individuals or collectives. Furthermore, within language this African Arab hybridization is furthermore apparent in Swahili which is predominantly a mix of local Bantu languages and Arabic. This hybrid extends beyond language and encompasses the convergence between African and Arab identities located across the same or similar landscapes and places. In particular, being situated in similar climatic zones proposes to engage with identity in a way that transcends fixed notions of where people come from based on geopolitics but more influenced by the relationship of social and ecological structures. This offers a fluid understanding of identity related to certain biomes beyond single attachments but towards multiple formations. The exhibition can therefore be seen as the organization of space beyond political borders but through the organization and materialization of matter that is the forest and the desert in all its complexity. Therefore, the exhibition revisits ideas of the school apparent in Sudanese art today and to extend this to look at art made by artists that identify as African, Arab or both working across the earth and their diasporas, as well as artists that engage with the landscapes of those places sewing together an interrelated network of practices that portray dimensions of the mystical, spiritual, neural, environmental, social, political and extraterrestrial.
Featured artists: Abushariaa Ahmed, Eltayib Dawalbayt, Gor Soudan, Issam Ahmed Abdelhafiez, Kamala Ishaq, Khaled Jarrar, Mohamed Abdella Otaybi, Reem Aljeally, Salah Elmur, Sheila Nakitende, Souad Abdelrassoul, Tabitha wa Thuku and Tibian Bahari.
Souad Abdelrasoul (Egyptian, b. 1974)
Souad Abdlrassoul currently lives and works in Cairo. Her artistic practice spans various media; drawing, painting, sculpture and graphic design. Working between the abstract and figurative, she connects human and animal figures to the Earth believing we are a part of it. Her metamorphosed figures do not seek to depict physical beauty but attempt to reflect on the connections between the human race and the natural elements of life; earth, metal, animals and plants. Tree-like figures with branching veins and arteries, and giant insect-like creatures merge on her canvases to remind the viewer of the vital bond between our internal lives and the exterior world we live in. Abdlrassoul re-conceptualizes the way we perceive space and re-purposes notions of form, science and nature into something strikingly personal, she exalts in the feminine, the emotional and nature. Throughout her work, she tells stories, sometimes using myths and legends that we recognise, to draw attention to how women are forced to evolve and grow in an environment that is oppressive and that restricts the life choices. She questions the role of women in society and cultural history in an unusual and disruptive way.
Abdlrassoul graduated with a BFA in 1998, completed her master’s degree in History of Art in 2005, and in 2012 she completed her PhD in Modern Art History. Since 1998 she has exhibited frequently in group and solo exhibitions in Cairo as well as shows in Nairobi, Beirut and the USA. She has also exhibited at international art fairs in London, Dubai and Marrakech. She is showing with Circle at Cromwell Place in London, May 2022, has been collected by the Chazan Museum in USA and is included in the new Phaidon '300 Women Painters' book coming out at the end of 2022.
Salah Elmur (Sudanese, b. 1966)Elmur’s work is composed of a fertile visual vocabulary that draws on his social and cultural heritage. He draws on his observations of life and memories of his childhood and youth for the scenes, situations and impressions that he depicts in his work. Heavy symbolism, a tendency towards vivid colour combinations, and distortion of natural figures and proportions are some of the markers of Elmur’s painting.
Inspired by the many photographs he has collected from his family’s photography studio, Elmur’s paintings often emulate formal portrait settings with additional elements that complement but also unsettle the mood in his paintings. Plants and animals share the frame with the human subjects, limbs are shortened and proportions are distorted, altering the relationships between various objects and figures in the frame. All these elements are combined in a somewhat surrealistic swirl of memory, and the resulting paintings are tender, intimate vignettes of human relationships, the rituals and poetry of daily life and folklore.
Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq (Sudanese b. 1939)
Ishaq, a Sudanese artist and art teacher, known as one of the founders of The Crystalist conceptual art group in Khartoum. This group rejected common conventions in Sudanese modern painting of the 1960s and strived to find "an aesthetic and critical language that would emphasise the notions of pleasure and knowledge in order to permanently abolish differences and boundaries".Ishaq has been called one of the most important female visual artists on the African continent. From 1959 to 1963 she studied at the College of Fine and Applied Art of the Khartoum Technical Institute that later became the Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Khartoum. Further to this, she pursued her postgraduate studies in painting, illustration and lithography at the Royal College of Art in London between 1964 and 1966. After her stay in London, she returned to teach at her former college and also became dean of this art school.
Eltayeb Dawelbait (Sudanese b. 1968)
Eltayeb studied at the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Sudan. His studies were interrupted when he was dismissed for political activities and he spent the following years living a nomadic existence in exile, struggling to make a living and continue his artistic practice. For the last 15 years Eltayeb has been living in Nairobi and is renowned for his inventive use of materials, in particular old wooden panels, boxes and furniture which he breaks down to make surfaces to etch and paint on.
Eltayeb has exhibited widely including a solo show at TAD Gallery in Rome in 2003 and a group show at Ensign Gallery in London in 2004. He exhibited at the Toronto Art Fair in 2006 and Monaco Art Fair in 2010. In 2013, he completed a large commission for PwC Towers in Nairobi and was part of a group exhibition in Madrid at the Gazzambo Gallery. He is a very popular and widely collected artist in the region.
Sheila Nakitende (Ugandan b. 1983)
Sheila Nakitende is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice focuses on experiences that include nurturing, evolving aesthetics, material culture specialty and methodological history while addressing current influences, challenges and transformations. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Fine Art and Design from Makerere University in 2005. She experimented with painting before exploring installation and performance art. Her artistic experience ranges from concept development, product and graphics design to gallery curatorial practice, coordinating arts projects, participating in local and international art workshops, residencies and exhibitions.
She participated in the Kampala Art Biennale and Kampala Art Auction 2016. She is a recipient of the Parent residency grant 2017 at WSW New York and internationally exhibited in Africa, Europe and USA.
Gor Soudan, (Kenyan b. 1983)
Gor Soudan is a conceptual artist living and working in Kisumu and Nairobi. His practice incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation and ceremony to reflect on social relationships and interactions with the immediate environment, and how these relations transform both physical landscapes and inner-scapes of individual imagination and collective beliefs.
During his early career, he created installation sculptures in response to the 2007 civil conflicts in Kenya. Called ‘The Fire Next Time’, human torso forms woven from the charred wire from street protests reflected on the socio-political dynamics of human agency. His practice has evolved with a continued psycho-spatial exploration of mark making, inhabitation and cohabitation, more recently taking on an interactive and social approach. After research into Kenyan urban and Ethiopian traditional coffee networks, and material experimentation with coffee, he created a wandering coffee ceremony which was a platform for conversations about our relationships to land, food production, rural and urban cultures.
Since 2019, Soudan has been largely based in rural western Kenya where he is co-founding a communal art space embedded in a market garden and tree nursery, which will act as a centre for art within an agroforestry project. His current research is focused on the forms and materiality of handmade agricultural interventions in rural and urban landscapes, considering how such interventions affect our relationship with the environment and how nurturing plants reflects not only development of our imagination but also our overall communal development. As part of this research, he has been worked with a collective of basket weavers, studying traditional weaving forms and incorporating new media.
Tabitha Wa Thuku (Kenya, b. 1963)
Born in the year of Independence, Tabitha Wa Thuku began her creative practice as a young, self-taught artist and one of the only female artists of her generation. With a career approaching three decades, Wa Thuku has made a name for herself as a painter unencumbered by convention, her works are distinguished by a varied palette which ranges from subtle browns to rich reds. Her work beautifully renders nature, a subject to which Wa Thuku has returned to constantly.
Tabitha Wa Thuku has created and exhibited consistently since 1988. She originally studied textiles and clothing technology at Kenya Polytechnic, then later, from 1996 to 1999, attended the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts. Wa Thuku had undertaken various workshops and residencies to develop a wide range of techniques, demonstrated in her extensive body of work. In addition to her own artistic production, she has also worked in various organisations as an art educator, teaching and mentoring children and young artists.
Wa Thuku has exhibited regularly throughout her career in Kenya and abroad, including in The Netherlands, Italy, Hong Kong and Denmark, and her work is included in private and public collections in Kenya, including those of the National Museum of Kenya, the Safaricom collection, PwC and MMC Africa Law.
Issam Abdelhafiez (Sudanese b. 1959)
Issam Abdelhafiez is an established Sudanese painter, illustrator and photographer. His work is inspired by the Sudanese people. He was born in 1959 in El-Zuma in northern Sudan, and he graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Graphic Department, in Khartoum in 1982. He first worked for a number of years in the 1980s for Sudanow magazine. After graduation he began his painting experience by criticising current trends, and he particularly focused on issues to do with representation and the socio-cultural context in which one can produce works of art. His experience and subsequent works have since developed through a number of phases. Issam now dedicates all his time to art and photography, working from his studio in Khartoum 2. He has held many exhibitions inside and outside of Sudan, and regularly collaborates with larger media and awareness projects and committees.
Issam has collaborated with Sudan Memory since 2019 to scan images from his photographic collections, some of these including more recent digital photographs as well as slides dating from the late 1970s up to early 1990s. Further to this, Issam has curated a collection focused around the Khartoum School art movement and influences of this, including artworks by a number of Sudanese artists that have been photographed by Issam. Issam has also contributed to a number of training and scanning activities by Sudan Memory, notably to record the archives of the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum.
Mohamed Abdella Otaybi (Sudanese b. 1948)
Otaybi is an influential figure in the Sudanese artistic movement. Otaybi graduated from the Khartoum College of Fine and Applied Arts, having begun working as an artist during a dynamic period of the 1970s. He was immersed in debates about cultural heritage and visual identity, which have stayed important topics for him and has fed the amalgamation of Africanism, Islam, Arabism and Sudanese themes of identity seen throughout his paintings. His painterly language has evolved over the years, using architectural structures, decorative motifs and calligraphic forms to echo the questions around cultural heritage he finds so important. A gentle activist, his work has a romantic hue of Sudanese life, nature, music and heritage and his use of colour and layering creates a dreamlike sensation on the mythological motifs he often refers to, adding depth and vibration to his paintings.
Otaybi has held many solo exhibitions in Khartoum, from 1970 to the present and has shown in international group exhibitions including the Sharjah Biennial, UAE, 1993; Modernism in Sudanese Art, British Museum, London, 2004; Sudan: Emergence of Singularities, P21 Gallery, London, 2017 and Khartoum Contemporary, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2017. His work features in private and public collections including the National Museum in Sharjah, UAE. In December 2018 Otaybi was the focus of the article ‘Masters we Need to Master’ in Collector Magazine published by Art Africa.
Reem Aljeally (Sudanese b. 1997)
Trained as an Architect, Aljeally is a visual artist and an aspiring curator with a great passion for channelling her talents towards addressing social issues and challenging social change, in addition to helping her fellow artists and enriching the arts scene in Khartoum, which led her to establish The Muse multi studios in 2019. In 2020 she founded Bait Alnisa to help promote and curate Sudanese female art.
Aljeally’s artistic approach has been focused on women, spaces, emotions, self-image and stories on the digital sphere. She has participated in a number of workshops and exhibitions with her latest “Bad Posture” with Eclectica contemporary in Cape Town. Her work has been displayed and collected in The United States, Kenya, South Africa, Qatar and France. She attended her first artist residency at Sudan Moves project with Goethe Institute in 2020.
Ahmed Abushariaa (Sudanese b. 1966)
A graduate from Sudan University’s College of Fine & Applied Arts in 1990, left Sudan in the mid-90s and spent some years in Kenya. He later lived for a short period in Cologne, Germany before settling in Kampala, Uganda, in 2000, where he still lives and works as a full time artist. His style is influenced by the pioneers of Sudan’s contemporary art scene, including Ibrahim el Salahi and Rashid Diab. In the 1960s their Khartoum School was recognised as an emergent modernist movement, known for its Sudanawiyya style – a synthesis of Western influences and other traditions that captures Sudan’s diversity.
Abushariaa has exhibited extensively in East Africa and in Canada, the US, Germany, Denmark, Monaco and the UK. His artwork is held in many private and public collections all over the world – in the African Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, and in the collection of the World Bank in Washington DC, the USA amongst others.
Khaled Jarrar (born 1976) is a Palestinian artist, based in Ramallah, Palestine. Born in Jenin his work explores the realities and impacts of Occupation and power struggle on the Palestinian lived experience, particularly in the West Bank. He completed his studies in 1996 in Interior Design at Palestine Polytechnic University, and worked as a bodyguard for PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He then worked as a carpenter, before graduating from the International Academy of Art Palestine in 2011. Jarrar’s work takes the form of various media, including performance art, photography, sculpture and installations. His works have been exhibited internationally, including Ayyam Gallery, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Khaled Jarrar (Palestinian b. 1976)
Jarrar studied Interior Design at the Palestine Polytechnic University in 1996 and graduated from the International Academy of Art Palestine with a BA in Visual Arts in 2011. The artist lives and works in Ramallah, Palestine.
Jarrar’s work explores modern power struggles and their sociocultural impact on ordinary citizens. Using photographs, videos, installations, films, and performances, Jarrar pushes the boundaries on the social impact he can elicit through artistic interventions. Over the last decade, Jarrar has used the subject of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a starting point for more extensive investigations of militarized societies, including the gendered spaces of violence and the links between economic and state powers that fuel and profit from war or political conflict.
In 2014, Checkpoint Helsinki commissioned Jarrar to create Hunger Wall, which was a barrier composed of loaves of bread that symbolizes the thin line between prosperity and poverty, particularly under military occupation. Dis-/Obey included dozens of volunteers who participated in a mock military march and an installation of camouflage uniforms. Live and Work in Palestine consisted of creating the first unofficial Palestinian stamp that he used to stamp official passports of people of nationalities around the world. These multidisciplinary works and interventions investigate military power, disobedience, and individual responsibility in conflict zones.
Selected solo exhibitions include those at MOCA (Tucson, USA), Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz (Dubai, United Arab Emirates), Art Bärtschi & Cie, now Wilde (Geneva, Switzerland) and Galerie Polaris (Paris, France). Recent group exhibitions include those at Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, Palestine), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), MuCEM – The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Marseille, France), Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (New York, USA), 57th Venice Biennale (France), La Triennale di Milano (Italy), New Museum (New York City, USA), 15th Jakarta Biennale (India), 7th Berlin Biennale (Germany) and London Film Festival (UK).
Tibian Bahari (Sudanese b.1993)
Bahari, a self-taught multidisciplinary artist with a background in International Relations from the University of Sharjah, UAE. Tibian explores subjects of mental health and the exploration of the spiritual transfiguration of womanhood, the unseen realms of political parameters and the resistance that comes from the sense of self, through the various approach in mediums and disciplines she uses. Tibian has gained prominence to her sustainable approach to recycling found construction wooden objects as a node to the Arts and environmental stewardship after her first group exhibition at The World Art Dubai-2016, which ignited her Artistic journey to this date. Along with various mediums and disciplines, Tibian is a traditional textile print maker and has been part of many exhibitions, art fairs, academic journals and workshops across Sudan, UAE, NewYork and Kenya. Multiple elements come into play within Tibian Bahari’s two artworks showcased at the current ongoing group show THE FOREST AND DESERT SCHOOL REVISITED, which carries its own story of the Sudanese diaspora individual; within the wider historical narrative of the school, allowing a space to further expand our reflection on intricate identity questions and prejudices.
