Overalls marks Salah Elmur’s second exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim and his first with the gallery in the United States. Bringing together a new series of paintings, the exhibition explores the figure of the worker in the vocational training centres and workshops of Sudan, places the artist has visited repeatedly over the years.
The representation of workers in art is rarely an inconsequential gesture. Throughout the history of modern painting, the worker has embodied individual dignity and the political aspirations of societies in transformation. For Elmur the subject is also deeply personal. As in much of his work, painting becomes a means of revisiting the social and cultural landscapes of his native Sudan, tracing the occupations, gestures, and environments that have shaped everyday life. Although he no longer lives in the country, he returns regularly, gathering images and impressions that eventually find their way onto his canvases.
The vocational training centres hold a particular place in Sudan's modern history. Developed in the decades following independence in 1956, they formed part of a broader project of national development, intended to cultivate technical knowledge and a skilled workforce capable of sustaining the country's industrial ambitions. Beyond their practical function, these institutions came to emblematize an aspiration toward economic autonomy and national sovereignty. In Elmur's paintings, the workshops emerge as spaces where this history remains tangible, carried in the tools, movements, and concentration of the men who inhabit them.
The workers in the paintings appear absorbed in their tasks, silent and attentive as they tend to intricate piping and machinery. Beneath them, the floors recall those of Studio Kamal, the photographic studio operated by Elmur's father in Khartoum. The connection to photography extends to the figures themselves. Although the men are engaged in their work, they also appear to have been arranged for a portrait, suspended between the activity of the workshop and the stillness of the photographic studio. Some figures have doubled or slightly displaced faces, a recurring feature of Elmur's paintings that evokes the blurred portraits produced when sitters moved during the long exposure times of early studio photography. By bringing this visual phenomenon into his paintings, the workers he observed during his visits to Sudan seem to inhabit the same pictorial space as the anonymous sitters photographed decades earlier.
Elmur's interest in the representation of labour resonates with the monumental murals of Diego Rivera and the work of Egyptian artist Fathy Afifi, whose depictions of industrial life have given visual form to the relationship between workers, machinery, and the social ambitions of modernity. Yet Elmur approaches this tradition through the intimacy of recollection. His workers do not perform heroic gestures, they are individuals absorbed in the ordinary practice of their professions, inhabiting places where the history of a country is still being built.
In Overalls, the workshop becomes at once a place of production and a stage on which past and present encounter one another. Through these portraits of labour, Elmur continues to assemble an image of Sudan that is neither entirely documentary nor nostalgic, but sustained by the enduring relationship between everyday experience, a dialogue with the photographic archive, and painting.
