Dirty Faces of War: Abusharia’s Grand Anti-Darfur War Exhibition

Sudan Tue 06-01-2009

Dirty Faces of War: Abusharia’s Grand Anti-Darfur War Exhibition
By David Kaiza

The old man looks sardonic, a face with eyes slightly hooded; maybe he is not sardonic, perhaps he is only caught in the throes of ecstasy of some sort

The painting consists of three distinct, rectangular divisions. There is the top half which is itself subdivided into 12 bars. The bottom half is further dived into two sections split on either side of the old man. The 12 bars are a range of colours and all around him; the old man is surrounded by sumptuous colours. The structural arrangement is a narrative device recognizable in nearly all Abusharia Ahmed’s paintings. The canvases are often divided into intra-acting, dialoguing parts.

An Old Man’s Story is a study of longing, of the artist’s recollection of a prelapsarian past before the furies muddied the earth.

But there is a moral to this act of recollection: “I start to go back to my village, I remember my neighbours,” Abusharia begins. “There was an old man. He saw an orchestra playing on TV and he told me ‘everybody carries a different instrument but they play one thing’.”

The Old Man by Abusharia Ahmed

^{The old man}

But before one goes on, a basic question asserts itself especially for someone who has been following Abusharia’s work for the last several years - why is he painting explicit human forms? As a Sudanese painter there are strict taboos about directly representing the human body in art.

A simple straight forward fact is that Abusharia has not been living in Sudan for sometime now and has gotten into the folds of East Africa were human forms are the basic elements of artistic expression. When he had just moved into the region earlier in this decade, his work merely gestured towards but did not touch human forms; a door way, a fish or a tree could be molded as to express the human body in outline. We did not see noses, eyes and hairlines as we are seeing more of now.

Rather, it is embedded in the kind of artist Abusharia is.

A symbolist painter mostly, he always has something strong to say, and in this collection of work that showed at Tulifanya, he took on one of the more powerful topics possible – an anti-war theme.

In his November 2008 exhibition at Tulifanya Gallery in Kampala, he presented an impressive set of work denouncing the war in Western Sudan.

Hence, even the use of the human form seems to be part of this interrogative challenge.

Abusharia is one of the brightest, serious and profound artists working on the continent. This time, he has summoned immense energy. An excellent executioner has gone to very great heights this time.

He matches with sheer creative power, the rage over Darfur and the senseless murders going on there.

A show like this resonates strongly in Uganda, a country that like Sudan, does not seem able to free itself from warfare. You can take this show over to Congo, Iraq and the Middle East and still be topical.

The painting titled Inferno is unequivocal about its subject. Blood red all over (and this could also be a depiction of hell with the charred human forms), uncompromising in the strength of the colours used, it was the first painting the artist started in this collection of 40 paintings. But it was painful one and has not been finished.

“I started to work and found myself using flaming colours,” Abusharia says.

Inferno by Abusharia Ahmed

^Inferno

Inferno is a scream. A loud, plaintive cry, it is nearly demented. At a certain point, the pressure and closeness to the subject threatened to torpedo the entire project. “It was too much and I put it aside,” he says.

Uncertainty mixed with anger; he made sketches which he did not complete and painted them over. There was a feeling of hopelessness; he found he was not painting properly. There was frustration; he did not manage to complete Inferno.

Abandoning it gave the artist room to stand back and structure his narrative – which should come as a relief to those who follow Abusharia’s work.

Seeing the war in total, he hit on the idea of narrating with a beginning, a middle and an end.

The first set of paintings on show present a world before the war, in this case, as a series of childhood memories - hence The Story of the Old Man. Through a series of small canvases, he creates variations on single themes such as Once in the Village, which runs from I to IV; A Day in the Village, and Sketches from my Soul, which also run from I to IV.

These series are packed full of what is beautifully remember and although you may not be Sudanese, speak in a universal tone so that they covey the sense of a lost idyll.

The middle contains the difficult topics. They do not scream out like Inferno, are nuanced, discussed, essayistic. They are most sombre, most profound and moving works Abusharia has so far produced.

They move by the emotional charge there in. They plunge to depths of despair: the anti-war plaints of Lost, Broken World and Dirty Faces of War stirring with the density of their realisation.

They are set in dark colours – nearly black all over. Hardly any light filters in.

Lost is perhaps the most moving of all the 40 pieces. More complex, highly and studiously contrasted, it as if the artist had peered down a black hole of sorts into which weaker colours disappear (and the desert beige is subdued). Hope and certainty too cannot withstand the strength of despair.

It is an abyss and one can only imagine what the artist was feeling as he painted it. In a way, Lost is thematically like Inferno. In Inferno, the earth is burning.

The symbolism – which is the twist of the knife that seers the soul is here deployed as the ancient symbolism of doom – the belief that the appearance of both moon and sun, can only occasion catastrophe.

“The suffering goes on day and night.”

He uses more symbols, of houses, Arabic script and trees. In Lost, the trees have dried up and stand as weather beaten skeletons.

Writitng Is On The Wall by Abusharia Ahmed

^{Writing is on the wall}

Later, as he lightens the tone towards the third part of the show, trees take on foliage and black paint (he treats his own colours) gives way to green.

In the third part Abusharia sings. We are no longer with the war. Rather the sun has risen, spring has come, and colours - as humans and flowers - explode in ecclesiastical joy.

Revolving around the theme of “Dreams for the future”, he resets his palette. He uses plain white, soft yellows and paints exploding vases of flowers. The joy is probably over-willed and the contrasts somewhat obvious. But it is a dream and wafts like sweet incense.

Dreams of Peace I and II are happy pieces, dreamy, celebratory, ecstatic, far removed from the flaming rage of Inferno. It is like visual perfume for the eyes, the canvas lost in an impossibly joyous flight.

These shifts in mood are fascinating. Abusharia manages to get inside the meaning of each emotional segment; hell comes as hell; the nostalgia is exact, the dreams dreamlike. Doubtless, it came from the artist subduing his emotions, though not extinguishing them. Ever since the war in Darfur begun, Abusharia has not lost an opportunity to talk against it.

“It’s not from a political point of view,” he says. “Its humanitarian. Whenever you hear the news, it gets worse and worse.”

The total effect of looking at all the 40 pieces is to see war for what it is – a destructive, profitless misadventure. Beneath the bad news, Sudanese artists and poets are some of the most gifted and persuasive on the continent. That they straddle the African and Arab world is added boon to their work.

Yet what makes it possible for Abusharia to do this is a brutal fact. Like so many Sudanese writers, poets and painters today, a man like Abusharia can only be this forthright by not living in Sudan.

With him, Khartoum’s loss becomes Kampala’s gain. Already, some of his technical keenness has rubbed off on younger artists – of particular note is Anwar Sadat Nakibinge on whom the Sudanese has made a deep impression.

Similarly living here has impressed itself on Abusharia, explaining the increasing openness with which he discusses him forms now.

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