The River, An Exhibition By Mutaz Elemam

Sudan Tue 02-03-2010

The River, An Exhibition By Mutaz Elemam
By Artellewa Gallery

Mutaz Elemam is a Sudanese artist born on 1979. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Khartoum, Sudan. He is a full time artist and a teacher for drawing and coloring to children, which is part of his experience in using art and painting in psychotherapy of victims of war at the Grace Child Care Center in Khartoum.

He exhibited his work in many solo and collective exhibitions and workshops within and outside Sudan.

Mr. Elemam is the editor of the African art file and not Apartheid art magazine, published by the Cam Casoria museum of Contemporary Art in Naples – Italy.

His artwork is a form of dialogue with the aesthetic objects, space, light, and the elements of nature and imagination. He uses the visual language as a basis for his aesthetic expression.

Mr Elemam has lived and traveled to most of the Nile Basin countries and lives and works between Egypt and Sudan.

He is a member of the Union of Sudanese Artists, Cairo Atelier of Writers and Artists and the Association of Friends of the Nile

Artist's statement.

"I try in this exhibition to document an eternal colorful artistic relation between the great river and its people, animals, environment, and culture. This relation is narrated through places and elements. The river for me is an old question, present in all my travels between and inside the Nile Basin countries.

The great majestic river represents visual and intellectual provocations for my mind and my eyes. While travelling by plane I can’t ignore my thoughts of these multicultural features and faces that are converged in the Valley of the great river, and noticed clearly from all angles.

All these aesthetic influences are questions that need to be searched in order to create a dialogue with its vocabulary which is an open field to aesthetic studies t as well. This was the first dialogue with the river (Father) - River Nile from its source in Lake Victoria in Uganda, which is the source of White Nile- one of the major tributaries of the River Nile. Or lake Tana in Ethiopia, which is the source of the Blue Nile - through Sudan, a nation that forms the great river, and down to the estuary in Egypt at the White Sea through the Damietta and Rosetta rivers in the end of the mission of the eternal river.

All this geography was formed by the river’s elegant aesthetic presence.

It may seem to you a map, abstract painting, a study of colors – or it may seem to you nothing.

However, I think it is a continuous dialogue on various topics within my larger project which is the celebration of the environment and to mobilize social support for it, and the resistance to climate change and the dangers resulting from it."

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