Salah Elmur, Missing and Lost People’s Day, 2021 Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Missing and Lost People: Salah Elmur and Sudan
A work of openness and inscrutability, Salah Elmur’s Missing and Lost People’s Day (2021) commemorates a terrible moment in Sudan’s recent history: the massacre on June 3, 2019, when security forces opened fire on a peaceful protest in Khartoum. Hundreds were killed, injured, or arrested. In this painting, which Elmur made during a residency in Accra, Ghana, he pays homage to the family members who continue to look for those who are missing—and to demand accountability from the government.
It is also a remarkably self-reflexive painting, because photography is at the very heart of Elmur’s practice and, specifically, the inspiration for the works he has been making since his mid-30s, of which Missing and Lost People’s Day is exemplary. Its profound political commitment also reflects the inextricability of art and politics, for better and for worse, in the Sudanese context. Sudan’s modern art history typically begins with the Khartoum School, which in the postcolonial excitement of the 1960s sought to find and represent a specifically Sudanese identity.
Excerpted words written by Melissa Gronlund for The Museum of Modern Art
