Salah Elmur: Just as the Heart of a Mango is a Stone
About the event
Bringing together paintings, archival photographs, sketches and ephemera, this exhibition offers an immersive encounter with Salah Elmur’s world, one where memory, landscape and identity merge and ripple through time. This show, focusing on works produced after 2018, explores the artist’s shifting sense of belonging and distance from his homeland, Sudan, in times of exile and political rupture. Through vivid paintings that intertwine memory and myth, Elmur reflects on his upbringing near the Blue Nile, where industry, agriculture and the lives of labourers imprinted enduring images in his psyche that characterise the social and political undercurrents of everyday life. These paintings build upon the photographic legacy of his family’s Studio Kamal in Khartoum. Elmur repurposes archival images, offering subjects who are captured twice, once through film and again in painting, a new way of being seen. Also explored in the exhibition are themes of reflection and refraction; how the self is split and mutated through corrupted images, alter-egos, and displacement. In this lens, Elmur’s practice transmits acts of seeing and witnessing reality differently. Curated by Zain Al Saie and Qutouf Elobaid. About the artist Salah Elmur’s (b. 1966, lives and works in Cairo) artistic journey is deeply entwined with Sudanese cultural heritage, resonating with the pioneering spirit of the Khartoum School and modernist movements within African and Arab diasporas. Inspired by his upbringing near the Blue Nile in Khartoum, Elmur’s work reflects the rich history of Sudanese culture. His compositions blend figurative abstraction and familial themes, reflecting the multiplicities within Sudanese life. His work finds a home in esteemed collections worldwide, such as the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, MoMA, New York, Le Centre Pompidou, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Zeitz MOCAA, the Sharjah Art Museum, The Gandur Foundation for Art, the Museum of African Contemporary Art, Morocco and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Image caption: Salah Elmur, Fire Behind the Mountain (2025). Courtesy of the artist SEE ALL EVENTS
