We are excited to share that Salah Elmur, the artist's most comprehensive solo exhibition to date, will be held at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. Opening from November 1, 2026, through March 14, 2027, the exhibition is curated by Zain Al Saie and Qutouf Elobaid.
Bringing together paintings, archival photographs, sketches and ephemera, this exhibition offers an immersive encounter with Salah Elmur’s world, one where memory, landscape and identity merge and ripple through time. This show, focusing on works produced after 2018, explores the artist’s shifting sense of belonging and distance from his homeland, Sudan, in times of exile and political rupture.
Through vivid paintings that intertwine memory and myth, Elmur reflects on his upbringing near the Blue Nile, where industry, agriculture and the lives of labourers imprinted enduring images in his psyche that characterise the social and political undercurrents of everyday life. These paintings build upon the photographic legacy of his family’s Studio Kamal in Khartoum. Elmur repurposes archival images, offering subjects who are captured twice, once through film and again in painting, a new way of being seen.
Also explored in the exhibition are themes of reflection and refraction; how the self is split and mutated through corrupted images, alter-egos, and displacement. In this lens, Elmur’s practice transmits acts of seeing and witnessing reality differently.
