Art movement · Sudan
The Khartoum School
The Khartoum School was a modernist art movement formed in Sudan around 1960 by Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ahmed Shibrain and Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq. It set out to give the newly independent country a visual language of its own by combining Arabic calligraphy and Islamic motifs with African forms, and it lasted until the mid-1970s.
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A new nation's art
Sudan became independent in 1956. In the following years a generation of artists, many trained at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum and in Britain, asked what a Sudanese modern art should look like in a country that was both Arab and African.
Their answer became known as the Khartoum School. Its central figures were Ibrahim El-Salahi, the painter and graphic artist Ahmed Shibrain (1931–2017) and the painter Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq (born 1939).
Letters as images
The school's most recognisable feature is its use of Arabic script. Artists simplified and abstracted letters into shapes, rhythms and even faces and bodies — an approach known across the Arab world as hurufiyya, from the Arabic word for letters. Alongside script they used Islamic geometric ornament, motifs from Sudanese crafts, African masks and the earth colours of the Sudanese landscape.
Shibrain's work leaned towards pure calligraphic composition; El-Salahi's moved between script and haunting figures; Ishaq's painting turned increasingly towards the female figure and the spirit world.
Break-up
By the mid-1970s the group had come apart. Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq broke away and in 1976 co-founded the Crystalist group, whose manifesto challenged the male-dominated Khartoum School and imagined the world as a transparent, ever-changing crystal. El-Salahi was imprisoned in 1975 and afterwards left Sudan.
Why it matters
The Khartoum School is one of the clearest examples of artists building a modern art out of several inheritances at once. It was influential across the Arab world and Africa, and it is now central to museum histories of global modernism, helped by the 2013 retrospective of El-Salahi at Tate Modern and a 2022–23 exhibition of Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq at the Serpentine in London.
Related movements
Compare it with the Casablanca School, which made a similar move in Morocco through crafts and Amazigh signs, and with the Zaria Art Society and the École de Dakar, two other answers to the question of what a post-independence art should be. For more Sudanese artists, including the painter and filmmaker Hussein Shariffe, see our list of Sudanese artists.