«What I want to do is talk to people» declares Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese artist and political cartoonist who for years has been dedicated to making his poetics an opportunity for dialogue, starting with the sharing of his own personal story. Albaih uses graphic and cartoonish strokes to create digital figures, animated by an incisive and immediate but never fierce socio-political denunciation, which forces us to face the contradictions of the present time, a time to which we often forget that we belong, preferring to look elsewhere, this side of the border of our safe zone.
Khalid Albaih, “EU Jesus”, 2015, digital drawing. Courtesy of the artist
At the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia a solo exhibition dedicated to the Sudanese art-activist is on show until February 2025, for the first time in Italy. The exhibition, part of the broader Active Citizenship project of the Festival of Peace, takes its title from the novel The Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, which serves as a narrative landscape for the viewer, who is called upon to respond to the appeal left open at the end of the book: «Help! Help!». The red thread that guides the journey is the theme of crossing borders, an intersectional theme that crosses the boundary between the virtual (the origin of many of the works in the exhibition) and the physical (the dimension in which we feel the effect those works have on us), between the places of the tragic (Sudan, Ukraine, the Middle East) and home – a word so beloved, yet so fragile, for the protagonists of the border narrative. And it is precisely from home that the exhibition begins, in a narrow corridor inhabited by typical Sudanese textiles, the Toub, made site-specific and laid out as they were in the courtyard of Khalid’s now-destroyed land. These, embellished with the drawings of another artist, his compatriot, force the visitor to physically collide with the materiality of a world, the Arab world and the world of war destruction, which totally exceeds our order of reality, our western (and free) comfort zone.
Khalid Albaih, “Citizen Journalism”, 2020, digital drawing. Courtesy of the artist
Then, after the reception of the hearth figure Aboba, interwoven with family memories from the artist’s torn childhood, one is pushed out of the sphere of the home. One is thrown back into the world through Albaih’s major graphic artefacts which, like milestones in a long corridor, accompany the audience in the awakening of their critical consciousness. The spectators, shaken along the crossing by the satirical and paradoxically playful tones of the drawings, rediscovers themselves as ‘spet-actors’, an active face of the world. Thus, armed with empathy and resilience, the visitors suddenly find themselves in a refugee camp (Camp), where the tents, however, are made of the migrants’ passports, passports, that from being instruments of hope become obstacles to freedom, given the difficulty of obtaining political recognition and, therefore, the status of person.
Khalid Albaih, “Camp”, installation view, ph. Alberto Mancini, courtesy Museo di Santa Giulia, Fondazione Brescia Musei
It is of people that this exhibition speaks and it is to people that it is addressed. Beyond the specific differences of political conflicts, the one irreducible remains the duty to protect the rights of the individual, in its singularity and in its belonging to a community. On this double register, individual and community, Albaih’s artistic practice also plays out. For The Season of Migration to the North, he involved other Sudanese creatives and immigrants who joined Brescia. The exhibition is thus an attempt to give substance to the voices of those who are neither seen nor heard, but who from the sea beyond the border, where all recognition seems to be denied, cry out «Help! Help!».
Khalid Albaih, “Aboba e Toub”, installation view, ph. Alberto Mancini, courtesy Museo di Santa Giulia, Fondazione Brescia Musei
It is precisely a video-installation made of authentic footage shot at sea, the cemetery of faceless migrants, that leads to a final room with the colour of cherry blossoms, a room dedicated to the season of spring or “artistic action as a possibility of change”. So, the message with which we are thrown back into the world by Khalid Albaih – and by those who have shaped the project with him – is a message that makes hope and awareness come together in a single narrative, one in which we too are the protagonists: the awareness that the knots that tighten the noose of human rights have not yet loosened (racism, dictatorial regimes, sovereignism) and the hope that resides in those who know they have the power to react. Act local, think global.
Ginevra Ventura
Info
Khalid Albaih. La stagione della migrazione a Nord
09/11/2024 – 23/02/2025
Museo di Santa Giulia, Fondazione Brescia Musei
Via dei Musei, 81B – Brescia
www.bresciamusei.com
is a contemporary art magazine since 1980
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