Working Times 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 centers and workshops of Sudan, places the artist has visited with admiration 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 centers 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’ industrial ambitions. Beyond their practical function, these institutions came to emblematize an aspiration toward economic autonomy and national sovereignty. Generations of workers passed through their workshops, acquiring skills, and contributing to the construction of a modern nation.
In Elmur’s paintings, the workers appear absorbed in their tasks, silent and attentive. 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 and introduces a subtle theatricality into the compositions. 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.
The exhibition’s title, Working Times, carries a subtle echo of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), in which the routines of industrial labour become a choreography of bodies and machines, at once comic and unsettling. In Elmur’s paintings, the workers are not overwhelmed by machinery, nor are they depicted as heroic figures triumphing over it. They remain absorbed in their undefined occupations. Their gestures appear both spontaneous and rehearsed, their environments at once familiar and staged, as the setting of a photographic studio. Like Chaplin’s Modern Times, what starts as a celebration of work and productivity gradually opens onto a more complicated reading.
In Working Times, the workshop becomes a place of production and a stage on which past and present encounter one another. The concentration of the workers and the persistence of their occupations speak to a history of knowledge, dignity, and heroic effort. But the paintings also leave room for a more troubling reflection on the fragility of what human labour can build and has indeed built in Sudan and in post-colonial societies. Against the overwhelming machinery of war, political violence, and destruction, the promise of progress and freedom remains unresolved.
Elmur holds these contradictory realities together, allowing the workers to shine as though illuminated by golden light, quietly working against the current, against the machinery of history, in pursuit of a better future.
