CAIRO.- Ubuntu Art Gallery is presenting the first monographic show of works by Nubian artist Hassaan Ali.

This long-awaited retrospective spans thirty years of a critical phase in the artist’s work - from the 1980s to the present day – and examines his versatile and expressive signature style by presenting seminal works executed in various media on a variety of substrates and surfaces.

The contemporary landscape of Sudanese art would be incomplete without mentioning a significant figure like Hassaan Ali. A self-taught artist with a thoroughly academic background toiling away quietly yet assiduously in his Cairo studio, far from the frenzy of the commercial and “commodified” art world outside; he has remained loyal to his artistic vision and carried on regardless with his own distinctive creative process.

Free, emotive and a highly personal visual vocabulary tackling questions about exile, absence and solitude all told through the medium of painting and mixed media; his work has kept a perennial freshness and an unharnessed energy that is only characteristic of artists who have chosen such a personal path.

Much of Ali’s artistic output is informed by the social, political and geographical climate he grew up in; “in my case it is displacement, dislocation and all the ramifications that those experiences bear on the soul” .

In December 1959, Egypt and the Sudan signed the Nile Water Agreement which allowed the Egyptian Government to construct the famous High Dam at Aswan. The building of the dam caused the flooding of large areas along the Nile in both countries, and some 100,000 people, mainly Nubians, were displaced as the lake behind the dam submerged all village communities between Aswan and the Dal Cataract in Northern Sudan.

Hassaan Ali was ten years old when his family was involuntarily displaced to New Halfa, a settlement site in the desert constructed to house tens of thousands of uprooted Nubians from the Nile valley to the desert.

An autodidact in art with an academic background in Politics and Anthropology from the University of Khartoum, his first forays into the art world came in 1976 just before graduating. He showcased his work for the first time in an exhibition organised by the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts which turned out to be a great success that it spurred him on to explore an artistic career professionally.

This retrospective on Ali’s work is one of the most comprehensive to date as it brings together a prolific body of over sixty-five works of paintings in oil and acrylic, monoprints, mixed media and drawings that illustrate his artistic practice as he experiments and moves from one medium to another exploring the limits and potentialities inherent in each; “ my work has developed and matured over the years in the same organic fashion that the natural world works. However, the only constant and recurrent thread throughout is my preoccupation with my homeland; Nubia is my obsession!“

The family “exodus” was like a line of demarcation for him, a young life that was suddenly severed from everything else that ensued. A recurrent symbolic narrative in his work is a sense of a long-lost landscape that will never be recovered again, a transmuted and painful memory that is explored through the process of painting and drawing.

“A work of art needs to tell people what they need to know, we cannot forget history and we cannot forget where we came from nor where we belong”.

From an artistic critical standpoint, much of his work explores his interest in the language of painting; in the arrangement and compositional elements on a flat surface, his manipulation of colours, textures and materials that he has been pushing by deconstructing, resynthesizing and continuously questioning his own process and thinking.

Most of the works on show are medium-sized monochromatic works on paper alternating with fewer bigger works on wood of highly saturated colours with spectacular chromatic contrasts, all imbued with a symbolic potency that reflects on the complexities of the world.

While some works may be thought-provoking and others charged with a sense of foreboding, this retrospective is essentially about the pain of exile, the impossibility of return and reversing history, and ultimately, a deep reflection on the unfathomable tragedies that are still unfolding around us.

Hassaan Ali was born in the lush and paradisiac town of Wadi Halfa along the banks of the river Nile.

Today it is a city submerged under water.

Hassaan Ali’s retrospective is ongoing at Ubuntu Art Gallery in Cairo until 28 October 2018.

Maie Yanni
Hassaan Ali’s art curator