23 November 2017 - 03 March 2018
This exhibition is a celebration of the career of Ibrahim El-Salahi, the Sudanese and Oxford-based artist, and Prince Claus Fund laureate (2001). El-Salahi is a visionary modernist whose experiences and voyages through Africa, the Arab worlds, and the United Kingdom, have resulted in the creation of a unique visual vocabulary and aesthetics that have come to define the modernist experience in Africa and Arab world. Conceived as part of the multi-sited exhibition Three Crossings, El-Salahi’s section foregrounds his experimentation with the genre of the ‘artist’s book,’ yet it also includes other works that contextualize his interventions in black and white, as well as broaden our appreciation of his overall oeuvre. These include his masterpiece notebooks, such as Visual Diary of a Waste-Time Palace (1996-1997), and his latest epic-like, The Arab Spring Note Book (2011).
The starting point of the installation is El-Salah’s early small-scale series By His Will We Teach Birds How To Fly, (1965), after which the exhibition is being titled. Although the installation here evolves spatially and chronologically to cover a range of El-Salahi’s works in black and white as they mutate into large-scale mural-like paintings, By His Will stands as an early landmark in his career, embodying his mode of work, his ideas, and aesthetic that binds his larger oeuvre. It is a testimony to El-Salahi’s earlier rigorous investigation of the best ways to move away from his academic training, and explore the creation of a new work of art, that speaks to his personal aspiration as an artist.
It is also a testimony to his spirituality and passion for freedom, not only in artistic expression, but as essential to human dignity and will to survive. This is symbolised by the ‘bird’, which has since continued to recur as a motif in El-Salahi’s work through the years, often symbolising the artist’s own conscience, and alter-ego as it is in several of his self-portraits, and masterpieces such as The Woman, the Bird, and the Pomegranate (1968).
El-Salahi spoke of his quest in the mid 1960s, as he recalls, ‘I cut myself loose from all ties to any style I had embraced in the past, or to any current school in the art of the period. At the same time, I was unembarrassed about staying open to the fleeting inspiration of vision and spirit.’ It is these fleeting moments, where visual images intermingle with visions and dreams, from whose components, El-Salahi has created the composites and visual dramas that have given vent to his artistic passions and emotions. In this regard, El-Salahi shares a surrealist’s tendency, in fostering exploration of the unconsciousness, and the move beyond reason to tap into a world of dreams, ecstasy and unrestrained fantasies.
Since the 1970s, El-Salahi has intermittently focused on creating drawings in black and white, (that is, in black ink on white, non acidic paper) using these contrasts, as he explains, ‘to try to evoke a degree of intermediate gray without actually mixing the two.’ The period after El-Salahi’s unjust political incarceration in the mid-1970s marked by his masterful and intricate drawing known as The Prison Notebook (1976), featured in this exhibition as a digital facsimile, has ushered a new direction in his work, defined by the artist as ‘endless organic growth’ paintings. The majority of the work in this exhibition comprises various units that share compositional affinities with those around them but are set within separate frames. The units are arrayed in formations, each unit being integrated into the larger design, ‘as individuals are within their social milieu, or the different elements of an arabesque design are on their flat surface.’ As this exhibition demonstrates, for El-Salahi, the work of art ‘is a permutation of elements that include an original, visual inspiration; a spontaneous artistic impulse, to a certain extent controlled and directed by the artist; and knowledge and skill in the basics of artistic creativity.’
- Curator Salah M. Hassan*
*Quotations in this text are drawn from Uli Beier interview with Ibrahim El-Salahi, and El-Salahi’s essay ‘Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Artist in His Own Words,’ both published in Salah M Hassan, Ibrahim El-Salah: A Visionary Modernist (New York: Museum for African Art, 2012).
'Do they not look at the birds, held poised in the midst of (the air and) the sky? Nothing holds them up but (the power of) Allah. Verily in this are signs for those who believe.’
- Su-rat al-nahl (The Bees), Quran