Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq

Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq is a Sudanese woman artist who founded with two of her students the group known as the Crystalist School. Ishaq graduated in 1963 from the Khartoum School of Fine and Applied Art where she later taught for over twenty years. She became an active group of pioneer Sudanese artists dedicated to constructing new forms of self-representation and the creation of an authentic 'Sudanese' art and aesthetic. Widely known as the Khartoum School, the group is credited with the rise of a distinct modernist movement in Sudan.

In her earlier work Ishaq was concerned with women-related themes and with ceremonies and rituals like Zar, a cult of spirit possession practiced by women in Central Sudan. Ishaq's interest in the Zar started with research for her graduation thesis from the Royal College of Art, London, in the 1960s. In her home town of Omdurman Zar was widely practiced among women. Inspired by an intensive field research she conducted in Omdurman, Ishaq painted a series of huge size paintings. As Ishaq herself claims, her paintings are the first records known by a modern artist of an established cult of spirit possession depicted and experienced from within.

The Crystal Cubes, an exhibition at the Sudan National Museum of History in 1978, marked the beginning of a new direction in Ishaq's art and a departure from her earlier Khartoum School's style. During the same year, Ishaq, and two of her students, Muhammad Hamid Shaddad and Naila El Tayib, issued the Crystalist Manifesto in which they tried to outline the philosophy and aesthetic of their art. Echoes of ideas of the avant garde, existentialism, and other art movements in Europe could be traced in the Crystalist Manifesto. Though not directly stated, the Manifesto was certainly intended as a critique of the Khartoum School. According to the Manifesto, the essence of the universe is like a crystal cube, transparent and changing according to the viewer's position. Within these crystal cubes human beings are prisoners of an absurd destiny. The nature of the crystal is constantly changing according to degrees of light and other physical conditions. As a demonstration of the Crystalist's project, Shaddad held an exhibition in 1978, in which he exhibited piles of melting ice cubes surrounded by transparent plastic bags filled with colored water. As in her work entitled Images in Crystal Cubes, Ishaq fuses a degree of transparency to her color scheme through depicting women faces and figures of distorted figures imprisoned in crystal cubes. However, her color scheme still reflects the 'earthy' style of the Khartoum School and her stylization of the human figure, mainly distorted faces, remains similar to her earlier work Women in Crystals.

Bibliography:

Hassan, Salah M. "The Khartoum and Addis Connections: Two Stories from Sudan and Ethiopia" in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. New York: Flammarion and The Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995.