IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI at the Tate Modern

IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI at the Tate Modern

 The Tate Modern is beginning to exhaust its cultivated eurocentricism, itself a curious, affable ploy and so has welcomed the work of an African artist who can also be defined as a Modernist and therefore an African waiting to be defined as a European. In previous epochs the work of El-Salahi might have ended up in the Museum of Ethnographic Art, patronised by white european art critics as primitive, curious yet worthless and laughably inept ethnographic artifacts. There is no protracted postscript or apology at the end of the El-Salahi exhibition and certainly none to rival the postscript at the Museum of Ethnographic Art in Dalheim, Berlin which seeks to "contextualise" the entire museum within a revision of the recent past and not an entirely convincing one either. El-Salahi is more captivated by his own mind than by what's happening in the external world to the extent that his technique is very often burnt off and seems to be a mass of doodlings loosely connected together by vast thematic material which evolved out of his re-engagment with his homeland, Sudan. His use of paint is often so restricted that it almost comes as a relief when a drop of red paint becomes apparant because his palette is often restricted to black, white, burnt sienna and brown duns that typify the Sudanese landscape. 

 El-Salahi was born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1930 and was growing up when Sudan finally became independent of Britain in 1956. He was educated in his father's school where he learnt caligraphic skills that would later become useful to him in his art career. He then won a prestigious award to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. 

 After spending some years in London he returned to Sudan but his western and modernist-inspired work was rejected when exhibited in Khartoum whereupon he attempted to re-connect with his homeland by making a tour of the Sudanese hinterland. Later he accepted a government post and was subsequently gaoled. In 1988 he moved to Oxfordshire where he now lives, possibly glad not to be back in the infamous Cooper prison in Khartoum. El-Salahi's many works look as if they have been assembled from smaller parts and his favoured medium is always the black and white line drawing, a distinct and restricted palette when he is using paint. He's a relaxed interrogator of the landscape which offers up latent gems and an absolute, transparent beauty. His figures are in some way engaging "natives" yet resemble somehow figures that hover inbetween the stone age and the space age. Its not clear whether they are clad in native costume or gigantic atmosphere suits that are also somewhere between earth and re-entry. 

 Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, August 2013

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