Very little has been written about the artist Hussein Salim. It is surprising given he has been exhibiting frequently in South Africa, his artworks sell out at art fairs and in London-based auctions and they present a unique abstract aesthetic. The fifty-something Sudanese artist attributes the paucity of texts about him to his terrible grasp on English. He has shied away from interviews. In truth, the unique turn of phrases he utters and his economy of language in relaying the essence of his life-journey – there are no spare words for idle chatter – add to his charm and make his story more compelling. In some ways it is a familiar story. Far too many African artists have had to leave their native countries to become and remain artists. However, the way in which Hussein Salim has found success and acceptance in a country with a reputation for xenophobia – largely targeted at African nationals – is refreshing. Uplifting even.

His largest solo exhibition in South Africa, The Garden of Cardinal Delights, which opened at the Melrose gallery in Joburg last week, presents a landmark of sorts. It is the culmination of a series of fortuitus twists and turns since he left his hometown in Sudan in the late nineties.

On paper Salim was not in any way destined to be an artist. Born into a poor family of 13 children there was pressure to pursue a stable income and career.

“It was a day of big conflict in my home,” recalls Salim of the occasion he revealed his ambitions to be an artist to his father.

“You are kidding,” was his father’s response.

Convincing his father that he had a talent worth pursuing was just one of the barriers. There was also the fact that the rural village of Karim, where he grew-up was an actual desert and a cultural one too. There was no access to books, images or art. The internet had not arrived either. It seems almost impossible that someone would grow up aspiring to be an artist in such a context, but, conversely it seems to have shaped Salim’s proclivity for images.

“I grew up surrounded by emptiness. Total emptiness. I never saw an apple until I was seven years old. I knew they existed but didn’t know what it might look like, is it square does it have stripes? That kind of emptiness and poorness allows us to imagine things because we don’t have it in front of our eyes,” says Salim.

Not only did this absence of visual references feed his imagination and desire to draw but it also set him on a path of abstraction which has marked his art ever since.  

There are a vast range of works on The Garden of Cardinal Delights, in different palettes and marked by varying abstract patterns. In Ducklings, all manner of motifs recalling letters of the alphabet, animals, fish and wheels,  swirl around a leaning figure and two orbs. This should make for chaotic scene yet all the objects somehow are suspended in a balanced composition. A work titled Francis is delivered through a much more muted palette, pinks, pale blues, which suits the layer upon layer of details, patterns, upon patterns. This large body of works are all more or less united by Salim’s distinctive language, which remains abstract, though the shadows of human figures keep them somehow grounded in a hazy landscape. He has never painted a traditional landscape.

“I never saw a tree or river until I was much older. That is why I started with abstraction.”

Hussein Salim

His proclivity for abstraction proved somewhat of a challenge for the lecturers at the University of Sudan in Khartoum, where he studied fine art.

“In a traditional education you begin with figurative works and then you can start to make abstract works.” The other battle Salim had on his hands was a financial one. To remain in art school and buy materials he had to sell his art straight-away. He discovered pretty quickly that the Sudanese do not value art.

“To be an artist in Sudan is a sin – is a social sin, a mistake. I mean it. We had a fundamental Islamic regime holding the power and marry that with a bad economic situation. We had a good school of arts but it is being demolished day by day. That place is seen as the devil’s place in the fundamentalist regime mindset,” he observes.

It was in the staff of foreign embassies that Salim found what he describes as “an army of good people supporting my journey.” It was through one of these clients that led a German art dealer to Salim’s home in search of his art. The result of this connection was a touring exhibition in Germany in the late 1990s.

He never returned to Sudan, save for brief visits. This wasn’t only due to more promising opportunities elsewhere but a deep and painful recognition that his art would never be appreciated in his homeland. This message was driven home in the year of his graduation, when he held a small exhibition at the Hilton hotel in Khartoum. Much to his surprise the current prime minister of Sudan was holding talks with foreign businessmen in the hotel. Thinking this might be an opportunity to secure a patron from the highest echelons he connived a meeting with the leader in the corridor where his art was hanging.

“He looked at the price tag and he asked me why it was so expensive. I was shocked. The Turkish guy standing behind him, bought that work. I realised then that people out of my country appreciate my art.”

Hussein Salim

This painful realisation saw Salim embrace a peripatetic existence, largely moving around Europe – Germany, the United Kingdom, Belguim and Norway – exhibiting and selling his art. He wanted however to settle in an English speaking country with warm weather. Australia was first on his list but a long wait in Cairo to secure a meeting for a visa made him consider South Africa. He knew he had made the right choice when the woman at the visa office waivered the fees and warmly welcomed him to the country.

He has been settled in Pietermaritzburg with his family since 2004. It has taken time for his art to circulate and gain attention but he has been carried by committed collectors in this country since his arrival. 

“South Africans have a unique taste in art. This might be due to its complex history. They know how to collect art and when you put something new in front of them they recognize it immediately. In one year I did better here than 10 years in Europe,” he says.

The most profound influence on his work came from an encounter at a Jewish primary school he visited in Germany. He was struck by the children’s acute awareness to survive and be accepted in the world.

“This is the journey of the artist. The Jewish child feels that he is standing against the wind, that produces abstract art and is born from his situation in Germany,” says Salim.

Being an artist is intrinsically going to be tied to a narrative of survival and “finding your place in the world,” says Salim. Interestingly, Salim has found his place in the world via an aesthetic defined by the multitude of cultures he has encountered through his wanderings in Europe. This has been married through a vibrant palette and filtered through layers of patterns, shapes and motifs that are drawn from different cultures. Perhaps it is South Africans desire for a multicultural utopia that allows his art to resonate here. Or perhaps it is his ability to imagine a world beyond what the naked eye can see. – African Art Features Agency funded by the National Arts Council in South Africa.

The Garden of Cardinal Delights will show at the Melrose Gallery until the end of May

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It is not often that a curator implores you to listen to visual artworks. Yet strangely this is what Gcotyelwa Mashiqa asks of viewers at the Black Luminosity exhibition currently showing at Smac Gallery in Stellenbosch. This unconventional appeal, which fortunately doesn’t manifest in visitors having to wear an eye mask as well as a face mask, speaks to two concepts that interest this independent South African curator. First; the visibility and invisibility of blackness and how the one might feed the other, and second, the idea that artworks speak to us in ways that transcend vision. By the latter Mashiqa wishes to draw attention to the way that we view images with a set of expectations and a language that could be a barrier to what the artist might be communicating. Put more simply, in overthinking the visual appearance of an artwork and deducing what it might mean, we often overlook how they make us feel and the ephemeral states they evoke. 

For this reason Mashiqa selected artworks for the exhibition that didn’t directly appear to engage with being black or blackness  – terms that manifest in this show in multiple ways that stretch beyond racial identity. In the context of Mashiqa’s drive to ‘listen’ to art – the title, Black Luminosity, refers to an absence of seeing – but also the potential in not being able to ‘see’. This makes for an interesting exhibition, particularly given the mix of artists – who are at different stages in their careers from Luyanda Zindela, a Durban-based artists who is garnering attention, to well-known international art stars such as Mary Sibande and Alexandra Karakashian and celebrated mid-career artists such as Usha Seejarim and Wallen Mapondera, who delivers a wonderfully cheeky work fashioned from toilet paper. 

A trio of works dominated by black grab your attention as you step into the gallery.  An almost life-size installation/sculpture, boleta le bofefo (2019 – 2020) by Cow Mash is characteristically fashioned from a mix of different black materials. The Bloom (2021) series of abstract paintings by Karakashian are all rendered in black oil – also a signature of this artist’s work. There are no aural works on the show – Gcotyelwa Mashiqa isn’t directing viewers to literally listen to art but to perceive it via other senses and modes.  

“There are other ways can we engage with artworks. We shouldn’t just look at them. As Mieka Bal (the Dutch artist and academic) says ‘sight is impure’. We have these biases and we are conditioned to see in a certain way. I wanted people to see differently to relearn how they look at artworks. Listening is about refusing to use the terms that were given to us and told to use while looking at images,” says Mashiqa. 

Of course, this approach isn’t only designed to upturn how we might look at art, or at least become more conscious of how our looking is socially conditioned but also pertains to racism, which is grounded in an inherent bias based on appearances. 

It is not surprising therefore to learn that the concepts for Black Luminosity were brewing during the first round of lockdown when the death of George Floyd gave rise not only to protests around the world but as a result heightened an awareness racism and prompted efforts to combat it. Black people were gracing covers of magazines and a form of visibility of black identities appeared pronounced. This response naturally coincided with renewed interest in portraits of black people produced by black artists. 

Indeed one of the artists with a work on Black Luminosity, Zandile Tshabalala, has noticeably been riding this renewed black portraiture wave with her slick paintings depicting a bald black woman who resembles the artist. Tshabalala reconfigures notions of feminine beauty through these glossy self-portraits often picturing the subject in idyllic tropical settings. Self Check: Lady in pink scarf (2021) celebrates blackness – the subject’s skin is pitch-black and her red lips and painted nails pop against this dark shade. This form of celebratory portraiture has being finding traction not only on Instagram but auctions, yet it is the only artwork in this vein on Black Luminosity. 

Gcotyelwa Mashiqa is interested not only in a spectrum of expression and how this may reflect different readings of blackness –  as not only about race, but sight and seeing, feeling – but also in encouraging viewers to look (and listen) beyond appearances she needed to present artworks that weren’t simply about physical presentations of the self. Not that this curator strategically planned each piece with a specific intention in mind.   

“It is only now in retrospect that I am reading the works on the show.  That is what I always enjoy about making exhibitions, I am not engaging with the work visually, I work more intuitively. I wanted to expose myself and discover my own biases as a curator. As a black woman, during Black Lives Matter, I wanted to ask myself: ‘what forms of anti-blackness have I internalised?’” observes Mashiqa.

This young curator first found her feet in this precarious profession at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, where she was appointed as one of the first curating interns. She became a curatorial assistant and gained attention, but found her time there (as many did), under the directorship of Mark Coetzee, not to be very nurturing for a young curator, so she left prior to Koyo Kouoh’s tenure. 

“It didn’t fit into who I wanted to become.”

Curator Gcotyelwa Mashiqa

Though there are now a number of new private art foundations in South Africa – the Javett Art Centre, Norval Foundation and the Joburg Contemporary art Foundation – this hasn’t necessarily translated into more opportunities for independent curators, says Mashiqa. 

It was the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale that provided her with a platform after she left Zeitz Mocaa in 2019 – she co-curated From the Vault exhibition, which is still showing a the university gallery in that town. She has also worked with the renowned Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu and has a project coming up with him in Nigeria later this year. However, it is a struggle finding opportunities in South Africa as an independent curator. Black Luminosity, came about when Smac gallery asked her to compile a proposal for a high-profile art fair. It isn’t easy curating shows in commercial spaces for the simple fact that commercial ends are not her goal, says Mashiqa. 

“The work I do is so museum like. The pieces I chose for this exhibition by Usha Seejarim and Cow Mash might not be able to sell. I have no other motive other than to explore my academic work. More galleries should explore inviting curators, people would probably not miss those exhibitions.”

Her interest in looking, visibility and perceiving conditions and expression beyond the naked eye can be attributed to Mashiqa’s early training as a photographer – but also an interest that underpins a master’s thesis which is focussed on analysing a photographic archive of ethnographic imagery. This led her to the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman, a French philosopher who presents some controversial perspectives on the way we read images. Black Luminosity was inspired by his essays. 

“Huberman writes that people are exhibited to disappear. I found that a provocative statement – particularly reading this in the lockdown when we are all online and we see everything. The article was written five years ago and addresses how hypervisibility produces invisibility. So what we see every day we stop seeing,” observes Mashiqa.  

Can we look at Mary Sibande’s work in a fresh manner – given this South African artist’s oeuvre is so familiar to us? Mashiqa was willing to take up this challenge including two works by this famous artist. A photographic work by Sibande titled Turn, turn, turn, turn (2019) juxtaposes two female figures, which  seem to represent a deity and a follower. The artwork brings into focus spiritualism and religious worship, an aspect that perhaps has been present but overlooked in Sibande’s art since her well-known Sophie series – depicting a subject in a Victorian-ised domestic worker’s outfit. 

Mashiqa wanted to not only draw attention to the relationship between spiritualism and blackness but also a metaphysical condition – that escapes logic, visualisation. In other words she is drawn to artworks that evoke states beyond the visual – that compel what she terms listening. 

Works by Usha Seejarim were intended to provide an unexpected turn in this exhibition, says Mashiqa.

“Usha’s works appear so masculine yet they refer to domestic objects.”

Curator Gcotyelwa Mashiqa

Slanted Representation and Art History at Home, are sculptures made from reclaimed frames. In the latter work Seejarim uses the frames to create a giant peg. In using the frame for images rather than presenting an image Seejarim sidesteps visual representation itself and digs into the collective history of imagery, transposing it into the domestic realm where women have and continue to toil in – and are forced to create their own visual history, expression – using what is at hand. In this way she evokes the difficulty in articulating and accessing a history of marginalised people that have had no suitable or recognised ‘frame’ for their labour and expression. In this context ‘listening’ to art might entail, sensing an absence – imagining the stories that haven’t been told, have had no place to be seen. – African Art Features Agency funded by the National Arts Council of South Africa. 

Black Luminosity is showing at Smac Gallery in Stellenbosch until May 20. 

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