Organised with Sharjah Art Foundation in collaboration with The Africa Institute, Serpentine presents a major exhibition titled “State of Oneness” of the pioneering Sudanese artist and leading modernist, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag. The exhibition which began on 7 October 2022 and will run to 29 January 2023 in London, is to celebrate the breadth and importance of Is
hag’s work and offer an insight into her worlds. The exhibition features works spanning from the 1960s to today, including new and never-presented-before works.
Kamala Ibrahim Ishag (b.1939) is a pivotal figure in modern and contemporary art, with a sixty-year career. Her well-known works, in which human and plant forms frequently intersect, employ a particular palette rooted in the colours of the sun, sand, and sky to examine the cyclical movement of life and the intangible aspects of Sudanese women’s lives.
Image courtesy of the artist
Ishag’s work is inspired by the flora in her home garden in Khartoum; the tales of spirits told by her mother and grandmothers, the field research she conducted with spiritualist women assembling healing Zar rituals, a traditional practice in North Africa, and the surrounding region. Ishag has also drawn on William Blake’s visionary topics and Francis Bacon’s contorted forms from her time in London, which she related to reflections of human faces and figures she observed in the curved windows of Underground trains in the 1960s.
Ishag paints on a variety of materials, including calabashes, screens, and leather drums, in addition to large-scale canvases and works on paper. A selection of the artist’s graphic design practice and material from her personal collection will provide context for her productive career and experiences of living and working mostly in Sudan, with a brief time of self-exile in London and Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Image courtesy of the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection
Ishag has developed a distinct and broad technique that is not defined by a particular style or movement. Her work embraces and depicts many earthly and spiritual environments as well as histories of Sudanese visual culture from various ages. The artist also focuses her work on women, spiritualism, Zar rituals, herbs, and stories from her mother and grandmothers on how she has experienced them. Drawing on a diverse range of contexts, Ishag’s work embraces different landscapes, histories and subjects to contemplate themes of spirituality, kinship and human relationships with the natural world.
Ishag was a member of the Khartoum School, an influential Sudanese modernist movement that forged an identity for the newly independent nation by drawing on both Arabo-Islamic and African aesthetic traditions, from the early to mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she co-founded the Crystalists, a postmodern conceptual group that challenged the male-dominated and identity-focused art scene in Sudan and pushed for a new aesthetic based on diversity, transparency, and existentialist thought.
Despite her integral role in these groups, Ishag refused to be defined by any singular movement or style. She has shaped a unique and expansive practice that spans global developments in modern and contemporary art. She has been a prominent teacher and mentor to generations of practitioners and her work continues to have a global impact on artists.
Image courtesy of Serpentine
