1939 -
Sudanese painter.
Kamala Ibrahim Ishaaq (also Ishaq) was born in Sudan, and trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Khartoum and at the Royal College of Art in London. She taught at the Khartoum School of Fine and Applied Art and was a pioneering member of the group known as the Khartoum School, which is widely regarded as responsible for developing the modern art movement in the Sudan. Like many other artists from Arab and African countries, Ishaaq conducted extensive field research on local cultural practices as a basis for her own work. Her early paintings drew on her intensive study of and participation in zars, primarily female rituals of spirit possession and purification in northeast Africa. This exploration of local themes was in keeping with the Khartoum School's interest in articulating a distinct Sudanese cultural identity, which they believed consisted of a mixture of African and Islamic traditions. In the 1970s, Ishaaq departed from her earlier work when she joined with two of her students to create the Crystal Manifesto, which some argue was an implicit critique of the Khartoum School. Opposed to the heavy values placed on skill and craftsmanship and an empirical view of the world, the Crystalists argued that humankind was trapped in a crystal-like prism, whose nature looked different depending on the observer's angle, thus providing a source of possibility within the entrapment. This existentialist perspective shaped her later work, which explored women's oppression and possession more broadly, most notably in paintings of grossly distorted female subjects, some imprisoned in crystal cubes.
Bibliography
Hassan, Salah. "Khartoum Connections: The Sudanese Story." In Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. New York: Flammarion, 1995.
Kennedy, Jean. New Currents, Ancient Rivers: ContemporaryAfrican Artists in a Generation of Change. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
— JESSICA WINEGAR
