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 Re: عندما ..تتحول جهنـــــــــــم الى نعمة... (Re: Adil Osman)
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Hassan Musa
By Salah Hassan
Hassan Musa is a Sudanese artist who works and lives in Domessargues in the south of France. Born in 1951, he graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Art, Khartoum Polytechnic in 1976. He traveled to France in the late 1970s and obtained a doctorate in fine art and art history from Montpellier University. Musa is a prolific artist who participated with works and performances in several exhibitions worldwide including the most recent ones at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England, 1995; the Mamlo Kunsthall, Sweden, 1996; Under a Different Sky, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1996. Since 1982, Musa, a competent calligrapher himself, has been directing workshops intended to initiate children and adults into different types of calligraphy. He also participated in theater performance through conception and execution of improvised calligraphy on stage during the choreographic show Ballet Naile which toured several cities in France, Spain and Algeria. In addition to being a teacher and an educator, Musa has illustrated several children and adult books of Sudanese folktales, and in recent years published limited editions of what he calls "artist books" in linoprint.
Since the late 1980s, Musa has been working on public performances he called Graphic Ceremonies, which are intended to deconstruct the very idea of art exhibitions as a rituals. During these performances, he executes large paintings on printed or plain textiles spread on the floor and invites the audience's participation. He emphasizes the creative act and not the finished artistic product which, he argues, is lost in the ritual of the exhibition. In regular correspondence with colleagues and friends, Musa uses mixed media on mailed envelopes and transforming their surfaces into plastic works. He creates collages expressive of certain themes by using the cover of the envelope with the stamps as a base for a design, adding to it old stamps and photographs painted over with pen ink and color. More recently, Musa has taken on biblical themes popularized in the Renaissance paintings, creating his own versions in a critical and as well satirical style. These are mostly large paintings executed in textile ink on printed cloth. In his latest series entitled the New Testament, he deals with The Last Supper and The Annunciation, creatively blending the designs of the fabric with his own painting.
Musa's most recent installation work The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1997, included in this Venice Biennale exhibition, is a triptych executed in three large printed fabric painted over with textile ink. The two paintings on the sides depict an angle carving a bow, inspired by a famous by the Italian Renaissance artist Barmezan from the Mannerist period. The central work, derived from a famous Titian's painting, depicts Saint Sebastian. The Saint, an early Christian believed to have been martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian. Sebastian's martyrdom was a favorite subject of Renaissance artists, and it was depicted by, among others, Gian Bernini, Botticelli, Mantegna, Perugino, and El Greco. Saint Sebastian is usually depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows. Musa views the artwork as a war weaponry and a tool similar to the Trojan horse or Stinger missiles. He views war as a domain where the end justifies the means and where the reverse is also true. He views this triptych as a support for a ritual he intends to perform as the graphic ceremony; a ritual which is conceived on two levels; a symbolic and an artistic ones. The artistic one, is based on the assumption that the viewer (the audience) participates in the creation of the work through his or her private vision. That the art work is a product of complicity between the vision of the artist and the onlooker. On the practical level the ritual encourage the audience participation in bringing the work to life through providing them with dart arrows to throw on the painting representing Saint Sebastian's body. The audience do not know that there are small plastic bags filled with red paint behind the painting. The arrows make the body of Saint Sebastian bleed every time an arrow is thrown at it. Gradually the painting will have red paintings in certain spot. The symbolic implication of this acts is clear in the mind of the Christian audience. The psychological impact depends on the guilt-ridden Christian memory burdened by the centuries of an oppressive and tyrannical history. Symbolically, this seemingly barbaric ritual derived its impact from the idea that we are all guilty by implication and none is innocent. The child-like joy to be felt following the act makes the audience momentarily disregard its symbolic implication. Like the artistic act, the technical superiority in a war may shield the soldier from seeing its horror and victims. Yet, as Musa stated it eloquently, "nothing protect us from our memory and its horror. The Americans have not forgotten the Vietnam war, neither the French with regard to Algeria or the German in relation to World War I. In the time of war, there is no difference between the victim and killer, if one is not a victim he or she would be the killer and none is completely innocent." What concerns Musa in this graphic ceremony is the artistic act which he emphasizes as full of endless possibilities. When one throws an arrow one never know whether he or she will succeed or fail, but when it hits the arrow hits the target, the body of Saint Sebastian, the paints seeps through the canvas and creates an unexpected change on its surface and composition.
The Double Appearance of the Virgin in Rwanda, the second work in the exhibition, is executed in a similar technique of textile ink on painted fabric. It acts as a support to the earlier work in emphasizing the meaning of the artwork as an exercise in treating forms as well as a symbolic act in dealing with subject of the appearance of Virgin Mary. As Musa argues, "the Virgin only appears at times and places of crisis when no salvation is left for the poor and oppressed, when even Mother Tereza could not help! For the Egyptian Copts or the Christianized natives of Argentine or Haiti, the appearance of Virgin is a sign of utmost despair. Her double appearance, takes on the facade of a Christian benevolence, pleases everybody; the victim, the oppressor, and the spectator."
In addition to being a performance artist who has experimented in various media, Musa is also an art critic who contributed regularly to several Sudanese periodical and newspapers in Sudan and abroad. Musa has been a vocal critic of the earlier generation of Sudanese modernist artists known as the Khartoum School. He accuses them of being ethnocentric in their intellectual orientation and their works were mere reaction to the colonial situation. He regards them as a reactive and not proactive response to the West, and as ahistorical, eclectic, and uncritical in their approach to Sudanese cultural and artistic heritage. Musa insists that the artist's energy should be directed toward enriching the pure visual and aesthetic experience rather than reducing the visual codes of expression to symbols in the service of ethnocentric motivations.
Bibliographies/Artists:
Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. London: Flammarion and Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995. pp. 240-241
Salah Hassan, "Khartoum Connections: The Sudanese Story," in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. London: Flammarion and Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995. pp. 109-126.
Hassan Musa. L'homme Cachee. Editions Grandir, Orange, France, 1996
Hassan Musa.Inchallah. Editions Grandir, Orange, France, 1995
Hassan Musa. Mon Premier dictionaire Français-Anglais tout en Arabe. Editions Grandir, Orange, France, 1994
Return to Bio-bibliographies page Return to Contemporary African Artists home page
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Tumadir
عشة بت فاطنة
Abd-Elrhman sorkati
طيفور
Nagat Mohamed Ali
gessan
nada ali
Raja
Adil Osman
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست