Salah El Mur

Born in Sudan, Cairo-based artist Salah El Mur spent years travelling and living across East Africa and the Middle East. Floating between different geographical places and nationalities, El Mur has a rich and diverse background while maintaining a distinctive and peculiar Sudanese identity to the extent of becoming a flagship of Sudanese art. His paintings portray a variety of heterogeneous tradition, folklore, vernacular of people and environments yet translated in a powerful contemporary visual language. El Mur deliberately ignores the logics of the relationship between elements. Thus, components are decontextualized and appear recombined together in a spontaneous family gathering. The plain aesthetic combines archaic traditions and visionary language. In this sense, personal memories interact with survivals from the past, creating artworks that unfold as relics of a suspended present as much as documents of a recurrent social phenomenon integrated into social life.