2013年8月29日星期四

A Visionary Modernist

This summer Tate Modern has broken new ground by giving a number of Arab, Islamic, and African artists solo exhibitions in one of Londons most prestigious contemporary art spaces. One of the most eagerly anticipated exhibitions belongs to Ibrahim El-Salahi, one of Sudans most important artists. This major retrospective places him in a global Modernist art context; the Sudanese artists vision crystallized in his ability to blend Islamic, African, and Western elements into a transnational,These personalzied promotional bestchipcard comes with free shipping. cosmopolitan whole. The show traces his personal journey across five decades of sustained creativity,The need for proper kaptontape inside your home is very important. his international studies, detention as a political prisoner, self-imposed exile to Qatar, and current life in Oxford. 

My father taught at the Islamic Institute and at a khalwa (Quranic school), which I entered at the age of two, learning to read and write. My father was a fine transcriber of the holy Quran, using a distinct Sudanese script. I used to watch him drawing on a whitewashed surface with date-palm kernels, some lines faultlessly straight, others fine, interlacing geometric forms in an Africanized arabesque style. I learned to design and paint sharafa, tablets used for transcribing verses of the Quran. I would ornament my tablets by drawing a frame of intersecting lines, making triangles filled in with contrasting colours. 

It must have been at this early stage of my life that I began to be interested in art, in aesthetic possibilities inherent in both the abstract lettering of Arabic, as drawn by Sudanese hands, and in the rhythm of African ornament, abundant everywhere around me. After that I began my formal education, where art was not on the curriculum. We had the kind of teacher who said, Drawing is a sin. But my father encouraged me in a quiet sort of way. I colored in all the black-and-white illustrations in my schoolbooks and made my own drawings too. In secondary school we did have art teachers and I got my first knowledge of the Western approach to painting there. 

In 1949, El-Salahi went to the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College, which he later returned to as a teacher. While in 1954, he received a government scholarship to go to London Universitys Slade School of Art. He majored in painting and did calligraphy as a subsidiary subject. Later he studied black and white photography at Columbia University, New York, a foundation for nearly two decades of pen and ink work with shades of grey in-between. 

While in London El-Salahi delved into the British Museums archive of antique Arab calligraphic manuscripts. I spent a lot of time there, studying the origin of the written letters, their structure and meaning. I even studied ancient hieroglyphics, he told Asharq Al-Awsat. 

But a period of questioning had started. At that time in Western art schools there was an insistence on realist art to which El-Salahi had to conform. On the one hand, I wanted to learn European techniques, about the Renaissance and so on. But at the same time, something in me wanted to come out.Custom qualitysteelbangle and Silicone Wristbands, El-Salahi knew that this method of teaching would not permit that.Browse our oilpaintingsforsales collection from the granitetrade.net! I was needing a kind of liberation from within, and I knew that for that to happen, I would have to return to Khartoum, to find the origin of my thoughts, my roots. I decided to open my mind fully to my heritage. Even the techniques I had learned, I felt I had to freeze, he said. 

So in 1957 he returned to Sudan. El-Salahi told Asharq Al-Awsat that he felt that he was armed with experience and ideas that I initially expected would help in my teaching and my own work. But this attitude of a conceited young artist fresh from London actually just hemmed me in. Before leaving I had shipped home the work I had done there, and I felt a riveting desire to show it. And so he did. But his own people rejected it. 

Although a lot of them came to the opening, they quickly vanished. I repeated the exhibition twice, but no-one came. The shock was a revelationI was astounded to find that the artistic tastes entrenched in the Sudanese personality offered no possibility of appreciating the expertise I had acquired abroad. I had to examine the Sudanese environment, assess its potential as an artistic resource, he said. 

At this time, El-Salahi also experienced an identity conflict. In the Sudan we have this duality in our nature, because our fathers came from Arabia, long ago, but our mothers are African. Perhaps as an antidote to questions of cultural and ethnic characteristics, he says: I find myself much more Muslim than Arab, because the Arab thing can have all kinds of racial overtones: it is from Islam that I get my values. Your values make you a better person and they help you create a better society. 

El-Salahi stopped painting for two years and traveled all over the Sudan, including into the desert to meditate. I needed peace of mind, to see with the inner eye. I was often quite ill in those days. I decided I would try to cure myself just by looking inside, which I did, by sitting there very quietly, he told Asharq Al-Awsat. 

While travelling, El-Salahi began to see aesthetic alternatives always available to Sudanese artists, particularly the craftspeople who were preserving their peoples legacy. 

I could see this mainly in decorated goods made of leather, wood and palm leaves, as well as in tattoos on the skin. What captivated me most, though, were the khalwa practices of drawing on tablets of acacia wood, carved as an abstract representation of the human body. 

As a child, he had been taught this skill, going on to beautify the tablets using designs called sharafa that resemble the chapter openings in the Quran. But El-Salahi realized that since his childhood these designs had changed, moving away from typical Quranic decoration towards a more intuitive and more decoratively Sudanese art form,Shop for wholesale tungstenrings from China! a local perspective, which he began to use in his work, which also began to appeal to his local audience. 

What later became known as the famous Khartoum School evolved as a result of El-Salahis experiments with the abstract and also representational symbolic potential of the Arabic letter, already present in Sudanese script and enriched by African ornamentation. I was fascinated by finding what would appeal to the Sudanese people, he acknowledged.
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