Meditating on the potential of the line with Ibrahim El-Salahi

by Eilís Doolan

One of the most prominent figures of African modernism, Ibrahim El-Salahi is known for his bringing together of African and Arabic sources, as well as his experimentation with calligraphy. Born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1930, El-Salahi was one of the members of the Khartoum School – a group of artists who pioneered a new hybrid Sudanese aesthetic in the 1960s. The group is most known for its calligraphic experimentation, conveying both Islamic and African aesthetics. El-Salahi recalls: ‘I was born into calligraphy.’ Today, El-Salahi’s work is considered on par with other modernist giants – in the MoMA, El-Salahi’s The Mosque (1964) hangs opposite Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907). At the Tate Modern in London, viewers encounter a similar comparison: El-Salahi’s impressive Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams III (2015) hangs next to another Picasso painting. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi’s Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams III (2015) next to Pablo Picasso’s The Three Dancers(1925), Tate Modern (Image: flickr) 

One crucial—and perhaps lesser known—aspect of El-Salahi’s calligraphic experimentation is his drawing practise. Since 1975, El-Salahi has turned to the pen-and-ink medium several times, creating three important serial works (visual diaries of sorts) which draw on graphic inscription as a tool of healing. El-Salahi’s Prison Notebook (1976), Arab Spring Notebook (2011), and Pain Relief Drawings (2017-2018) are powerful examples of the complex potentials of the graphic line. 

In September 1975, El-Salahi was arrested by Sudanese dictator Gaafar Nimiery’s regime on false suspicion of anti-government activities and subsequently imprisoned in Sudan’s notorious Kober Prison, where he was held for six months without a trial. Perhaps unexpectedly, imprisonment was a time of both suffering and enlightenment: ‘I was able to see clearly where in earlier days I had gone wrong – in my work, my intellectual perceptions, my performance’, El-Salahi says. While imprisoned, the artist continued making art in secret, drawing on scraps of found paper and hiding them in the sand to avoid punishment. 

Following his release from prison, El-Salahi produced Prison Notebook (1976), an impressive sketchbook of pen-and-ink drawings combined with text which records the artist’s memories of imprisonment and its psychological effects. The notebook was acquired by the MoMA in 2017. El-Salahi explains: ‘When I came out of jail, I had to write things down and draw them so I didn’t forget’. Thus, the Prison Notebook can be understood as a mnemonic practise. Remembrance is crucial. Most of the notebook’s 38 pages combine drawings and Arabic script in a creative manner not dissimilar to a manuscript. Several pages contain long passages of prose or poetry without any accompanying drawings, indicating the importance of writing to El-Salahi’s diaristic practise.

 A motif featuring frequently in the Prison Notebook is the bird. One ink drawing depicts a young man seated on the floor in a nervous pose. A bird sits on the figure’s left knee. In the accompanying text, El-Salahi writes a reminder, as if spoken to him by the bird: ‘peace will permeate the heart, forcing out fear and panic, and unswerving faith will settle in.’ Explaining this page in 2017, El-Salahi describes the bird as being ‘like a conscience, talking to you.’ 

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Prison Notebook, 1976, pen and ink on paper 

And peace will permeate the heart, 

Forcing out fear and panic, 

And unswerving faith will settle in. 

Remaining in prison is a personal choice. 

Procrastination is the pretext of fear. 

Toward the end of the Prison Notebook, another page features a short poem in black calligraphic script, accompanied by a diagrammatic circular drawing. The poem reads: ‘With my own hands, I shall open the future’s curtain. / With my own hands, I shall write my poems...’  The phrase ‘with my own hands’ is repeated five times, thus making clear the compulsion driving the notebook’s creation: El-Salahi’s desire to reclaim agency following his wrongful imprisonment, exercised by the drawing and writing of his own hand. In creating this image-text, El-Salahi affirms the power of his own hand not only to shape words and images, but to shape the world as he sees it, and possibly even to shape the future. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Prison Notebook, 1976, pen and ink on paper

With my own hands, I shall open the 

            future’s curtains. 

With my own hands, I shall write my 

            poems. 

With my own hands, I shall write the 

            pronouncement for my last day. 

With my own hands, I shall illustrate the 

            shape of words. 

With my own hands. 

The symbol is a letter that runs and 

            meanders,

Going up and down, waning, rolling, 

Making circles around piles. 

And the pens run dry, 

And the curtains are up. 

El-Salahi’s inscription gains further significance when we consider the sacrality of the written word in Islam. Sufism, the Islamic sect to which El-Salahi belongs, places particular importance on inscription; Sufi literature sometimes describes saints as ‘a pen in the hand of God’. On multiple occasions, El-Salahi has described his project as guided by faith: ‘I realize the work comes through me’, he says, ‘it is originated by someone else – which is Allah’. While drawing, he says, ‘I felt like a spiritual medium.’ El-Salahi’s artistic practise is a prayer-like exercise which reconciles the spiritual and material, invoking the sacrality of the Qur’anic letter and the ability of graphic inscription to act as a meditative process maintaining a spiritual connection to God. 

More than three decades after the Prison Notebook, El-Salahi returned to the pen-and-ink diaristic medium in his Arab Spring Notebook (2011), a notebook of drawings responding to political protests in the Arab world witnessed by El-Salahi while he was living in the UK. Consisting of 46 ink drawings, the notebook visualises the artist’s hopeful feelings toward the uprising against dictatorship and tyranny. Unaccompanied by text and more densely crowded in their imagery than the Prison Notebook, the Arab Spring drawings combine the real and the fantastical. One drawing depicts a flying head with outstretched arms. Where the brain should be, a pattern of interlocked tubular shapes suggests a chain – a reading corroborated by El-Salahi’s titling of this drawing as Still many chains to shed, referring to the Arab world’s project to rid itself of tyranny. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Still many chains to shed, from the Arab Spring Notebook, 2011 

El-Salahi’s most recent iteration of the pen-and-ink diaristic medium are his Pain Relief Drawings (2017-2018). Responding to his own experience of chronic physical pain, the drawings are completed on small pieces of paper and mundane household objects including medicine packets. One drawing depicts a vertical structure overcrowded with stick figures, calling to mind images of refugees arriving on European shores, or the Middle Passage. Another drawing incorporates the plastic window of an envelope, depicting a face whose wide eyes gaze out at the viewer. Whether the drawings relate to the subject of pain is not clear. Instead, the focus is on the act of drawing itself. Thus, the Pain Relief Drawings spell out a connection already embodied in El-Salahi’s earlier Prison Notebook and Arab Spring Notebook, namely that between inscription and its cathartic power. Speaking of creating these drawings, El-Salahi admits: ‘it is like a form of meditation; I don’t feel the pain at all. It is a kind of medicine itself’. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Pain Relief Drawings, 2017-2018, pen and ink on paper, Vigo gallery

El-Salahi’s pen-and-ink series reveal a crucial part of El-Salahi’s artmaking: the adoption of graphic inscription to put on paper his memories, fears, hopes, and pains. For El-Salahi, the pen serves as both a mnemonic and therapeutic tool. Ultimately, El-Salahi’s oeuvre thus reminds us of the complex role of inscription in global Modernism. In contrast to Western semiotics, El-Salahi’s pen reveals that the relationship between the graphic mark and the object which it represents is far more intimate than Saussure may have thought. In this case, the sign itself constitutes a reality – it is the reality to which it refers. 

El-Salahi’s drawings invite us to meditate on the possibilities of the graphic line beyond its Western understanding as a mere element of composition. His oeuvre foregrounds the endless potentials of inscription not just to act as a signifier for something outside the picture plane, but to embody the spiritual and healing effects of artmaking.

Bibliography

Adams, Sarah. “In My Garment There Is Nothing but God: The Work of Ibrahim El Salahi.” In Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, edited by Salah M. Hassan, 54-87. New York: Museum for African Art, 2012.  

El-Salahi, Ibrahim. Ibrahim El-Salahi: The Arab Spring Notebook. Interview by Nick Hackworth. Modern Forms, 2016.  

Fritsch, Lena. Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Sudanese Artist in Oxford. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2018. 

Hassan, Salah M. “Ibrahim El-Salahi and the Making of African and Transnational Modernism.” In Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, edited by Salah M. Hassan, 10-27. New York: Museum for African Art, 2012.  

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Prison Notebook. Edited by Salah M. Hassan. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018.  

Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Ibrahim El-Salahi and Postcolonial Modernism in the Independence Decade.” In Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, edited by Salah M. Hassan, 28-39. New York: Museum for African Art, 2012.  

Roberts, Mary Nooter. “Sacred Scripts.” In Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, edited by Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney and Allyson Purpura, 89-206. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2007. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548196.