The Brooklyn Rail

Salah Elmur (b. 1966, Khartoum, Sudan; lives and works in Cairo, Egypt) reflects on his upbringing near the Sudanese Blue Nile, rich and decent, and filled with music, marked by early experiences observing his mother sew and his father completing architectural drawings by hand, while other relatives worked in the hot sun as farmers and fishermen. Inspired by his surroundings, Elmur completed his first solo exhibition at the Khartoum School and, as an adult in the 1990s, published a cartoon that his government deemed too critical, which led to the artist’s arrest, followed by a brief period in prison before he left the country, seeking asylum in Kenya and later Egypt, where he has been based for the past twelve years. In The Land of the Sun, Elmur channels themes of displacement alongside those of ritual, all via compositions showcasing his native Sudan, a country that has found more conflict than peace since its independence in 1956—exploring the walls that equally confine us and bring solace.

The exhibition, on view at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Mexico City, presents the artist’s latest works, a continuation of his distinctive “figurative abstraction,” a term Elmur uses to describe his artistic practice, the tones and shapes reminiscent of renowned Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Both artists have examined the personal narratives of laborers in their works, within broader social and political contexts, yet where Rivera’s murals communicate revolutionary ideals, Elmur’s paintings are quieter—almost surrealist in nature—and perhaps more enigmatic. The Road to the Fish Market (2024), for example, pulls from the artist’s archive of imagery, or from what he calls a “big warehouse store full of shelves,” wherein each metaphorical shelf is filled with boxes, each containing a scene from Elmur’s daily life. This showcases five human subjects in an outdoor setting, holding or transporting fish throughout a market in a sacred procession, plus an accompanying dog and two surrealist floating half-heads, anatomically fragmented and complex. The scattered fish embody the routines of daily life, toeing the line between realism and symbolism. In many of Elmur’s paintings, animals possess an ancestral, near spiritual presence, and are shown subtly in everyday situations; these creatures are not separate from the human experience but a part of it, as shown in Rabbit Performers (2024), another large-scale acrylic on canvas. In the work, two male performers dressed in orange hold a white rabbit, while a third subject, dressed in pink-hued white, looks on, and a second double, or floating, head is positioned in a mirrored fashion. The performance is something to be celebrated yet concealed, highlighting the wall motif that repeats throughout the exhibition, illustrating the artist’s lived and observed experiences escaping the heat—real and allegorical—in order to survive. Throughout, subjects press against walls, lingering in doorways, or finding relief in market stalls, searching for shadows, finding comfort in the shade.

Elmur’s warm palette of golden yellows and sun-scorched reds places viewers before walls of their own, here too with undertones of post-colonial reckoning. The works in The Land of the Sun hold traces of a country fractured by power, of a place where identities shift between the personal and the collective, or between liberation and entrapment. Elmur visually comments on the thirty-some years of suffering he witnessed in his country, and while his paintings aren’t overtly political in their imagery, their sheer existence is an act of resilience. The geometric faces he brings to life—among them female subjects playing contentedly with bright-colored hula-style hoops in Helloub Wall (2024) and those in mourning in Farewell Wall (2024)—are fragile yet determined to maintain independence and cling to what’s sacred. The Old Flag Wall (2024) is practically revolutionary, depicting a Sudanese man dressed in green, his expression forlorn, body in motion, one hand gripping Sudan’s former flag. He walks by a wall covered in revolutionary fists as a young girl or woman stands cautiously nearby, her head shown twice in the artist’s signature style, her hands in these same fists, perhaps bridging the gap between the nation’s past and future.

Elmur notes that while he primarily paints scenes from Sudan, offering his take on a country in crisis, his works transcend borders, and in this way his latest exhibition does not focus on loss or devastation; rather, in The Land of the Sun, Elmur preserves moments of continuity by focusing on the relationships and daily routines he himself has witnessed, growing up in a village, and watching his people’s stories unfold. The figures in each painting hold and influence the spaces they inhabit, serving as both memory and prophecy, bringing balance to the two in equal measure.