Ahmed Salim: Bridging Two Generations

I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of my friend, the artist Ahmed Salim. We met in Khartoum last December and had planned to continue an old discussion on the lessons of the self-taught artists’ movement in Sudan. Ahmed Salim is an important name in this complex artistic and political scene, a tapestry woven from both the public and the private.

I will try to organize my old notes to present our late teacher and friend to those interested in the visual arts, as one of the authentic faces of public cultural work in Sudan.

The Artist Ahmed Salim was born in 1927 in the city of Wad Medani. He held his first solo exhibition – which he himself regarded as the very first modern art exhibition in Sudan – in 1952 at the House of Culture in Khartoum. He confirmed this to us in an interview during his exhibition at the Abu Ginzir gallery in June 1976. Although some graduates of the School of Design who were active in the capital at that time might dispute his claim, the essential point of Ahmed Salim’s exhibition at the House of Culture is that painting exhibitions began to take root in a new way – as a cultural matter. This was a departure from the earlier self-taught pioneers, whose works were encountered in urban spaces used for purposes other than art viewing.

In the years following that exhibition, and with the arrival of the first graduates from the School of Design, this new form of public engagement became ingrained in urban cultural life. Exhibitions soon diversified beyond the easel painting format. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sudanese cities were discovering sculpture exhibitions (Abdel Raziq Abdel Ghaffar) and pottery exhibitions (Nasif Isaac George at the American Cultural Center). Audiences grew accustomed to the ritual of this new cultural spectacle: exhibitions were held to showcase “culture,” considered essential for national progress and societal development. This echoed the ideology of an urban middle class whose political legitimacy (the Graduates’ Congress) stemmed from its relative cultural enlightenment – a privilege tied to its social status. Beyond these ideological dimensions, the concept of “culture” became a necessary mechanism for social development in Sudan. Within this context, we can understand the passion of a generation of Sudanese creators like Ahmed Salim, who struggled and sacrificed so much for the advancement of cultural work.

Ahmed Salim: The Artist as a Bridge

Among the self-taught artists who followed the style of Ali Osman, Ahmed Salim stands out as the best intermediary between two artistic modes. At times, he appeared to be an “intellectual” artist who felt out of place among the self-taught, and at other times, a self-taught artist who seemed a stranger among the “college crowd.” In popular terms, he was a “bridge between two generations.” This is not surprising, since Ahmed Salim’s professional journey differed from theirs.

While he acknowledged Ali Osman’s influence on him and his peers – saying, “Ali Osman is the one who taught us how to draw and what to draw” (in an interview at his home in Bahri, June 1978) – he did not stop at Ali Osman’s “instructions.” He had the opportunity to acquire certain drawing techniques in a formal, systematic way, particularly during his professional training as a “technical draftsman” while working for the Ministry of Irrigation in Wad Madani.

As we knew him, Ahmed Salim benefited immensely, both technically and intellectually, from his close friendships with many younger artists. This made him a “quasi-self-taught artist” whose work was closer to the style of the “college crowd” than to that of Ali Osman school. His open aesthetic spirit and dialogic nature enabled him to serve as a bridge between two generations of artists, allowing him to paint and exhibit continuously from the 1940s through the 1980s. The uniqueness of Ahmed Salim lies in the fact that the man who began his artistic journey with Ali Osman continued his creative path alongside the generation of his children.

The Art of Cultural Rupture

The collective effort to which Ahmed Salim contributed, along with other eminent self-taught artists, lay in establishing a new cultural tradition among the urban populations of Sudan. I believe they paved the way for the modern artists – the graduates of art schools – preparing the stage for an aesthetic rupture with the older cultural tradition, one that was religiously wary of the presence of modern cultural symbols in the life of a Muslim society.

Through their spontaneous and free production, the self-taught artists of the 1930s and the 1940s imprinted the urban space with authentic iconographic of modernity. They justified the necessary break with the imagery of pre-capitalist culture and prepared the visual ground for a new generation of artists concerned with the role of art in processes of social change. The cultural rupture experienced by urban Sudanese as a part of the modernist project required them to cultivate modern cultural alternatives quickly, under conditions of unprecedented material and symbolic hardship. Within this context, the noble visual contribution of the self-taught artists played a vital role in placing Muslims in Sudanese cities on the bench of modern artistic tradition, preparing them to accept the movement of modern painting as something natural, despite the religious reservations about images embedded in Sudan’s Arab-Islamic cultural heritage (“Angels do not enter a house that has either a dog or a picture in it” – Sahih al-Bukhari).

In this regard, we owe them gratitude, for they contributed to humanizing the Sudanese city and shaping its iconographic urban environment to suit its inhabitants. This profound contribution – which has passed through the history of Sudanese culture with little attention from researchers in the sociology of culture – calls us to reflect on the concept of cultural rupture as a multidimensional project, pursued by groups, institutions, and individuals whose motivations and interests varied, but who all, in their own way, helped open the channels through which modernity could flow, sustaining a society still unborn, waiting for its future to arrive.

There is a famous but false saying attributed to the Russian poet Yevtushenko: that poetry is impossible after thirty. The falsity of this claim becomes apparent when you encounter someone with the passion and artistic drive of Ahmed Salim.

When we met in December 2009, Ahmed Salim spoke to us of his current artistic projects and his preoccupations with sculptural depictions of figures from the Sudanese national movement. I do not know how far he advanced with this project, but I was elated at the thought that this elder pioneer-artist remained so deeply engaged with art, at a time when generations of younger artists had abandoned the practice and left it behind –as locals would say, “like a lover who runs away.”

From the long path Ahmed Salim walked, we inherit a valuable lesson, which can be summed up in this: poetry is indeed possible after thirty.