Absence of memory/presence of the self - [January 2023]

“At this stage in the development of Issam Abdel Hafiez’s artistic contribution, visual and cognitive experiences are transformed into a highly pure visual language. This exhibition summarizes what Issam achieved through a journey of multi-entries and experiences, in which he practiced photography, design, illustration and painting, searching the logic of the visual language and heading towards reducing the many colors and representational elements (bodies, faces and buildings) that characterized the previous stages of his experience. In his works presented here, Issam gives way to implicit color values (black, brown, and gray) to express a mysterious state that surrounds the image, appearing to the viewer as cloudy worlds of a dusky memory.

Through various efforts in the last years, Issam worked through photography and film making to build a visual archive of Sudanese memory that documents times and different events that his country went through in general; the city he grew up in and lived in particularly, which is Khartoum. He focused on the prime times and recessions of institutions, spaces, lives and artistic practices. In this exhibition, these various themes appear implicitly and indirectly, not as documentary testimonies, but rather as a living experience that formed the artist’s awareness of himself, his field of life, and his relationship with his society, and as a participation in resisting the intended efforts to obscure public memory. In other words, Issam’s work reflects to us his continuous research in the field of interrogating sceneries through a visual language that is renewed in parallel with the transformations of reality, in proof of the presence of the human self and its proactivity in the face of absenting awareness and suppression of the will for change.”

Dr. Mohammed Abdelrahman Hassan
Curator

Rahiem Shadad: I had the great honor of working alongside Dr. Hassan (AKA Dr. Bob) and host the solo exhibition of renowned Sudanese artist Issam Abdelhafiez at Downtown Gallery. The exhibition was accompanied by an artist talk with panelist: Reem Abbas (Writer & Curator), Hassan Musa (Artist & Writer), and Khalid Albeih (Artist).