Figure 5 Hassan Musa painting Autoportrait avec idées noires, 2003. Mixed media and ink on textile, 232 x 142 cm. The artist has seated himself between early 20th century icons Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker, whose contrasting public performances fuelled French racial and gender stereotypes


3. Self-taught calligraphy. My engagement with Arabic calligraphy, about age 13, is related to my experience of working on Assalam, the mural newspaper at my intermediate school. (Assalam is peace in Arabic.) Students pinned their news reports on the school wall, and I used to write the title in an ‘artistic’ way—although I was unconscious of doing calligraphy. To me, it was just drawing. In secondary school, I was good enough to earn money by decorating cars and buses or by writing commercial signs, thanks to Sambo, our neighbour who ran an automobile workshop. By the time I arrived at the School of Art at Khartoum Polytechnic (1970), I was aware that Arabic calligraphy was celebrated as an element of Sudanese cultural identity. Indeed, at the School, it was almost the official theory of Sudanese art. Ibrahim el Salahi and Ahmed Shibrain and their students were proud to utilize calligraphy for all occasions. However, the political situation of the 1970s in Sudan pushed our generation against those ‘Khartoumists’ and the political authority that supported them. We were politically and artistically incompatible. While these conditions made me suspicious about the identity discourse associated with Arabic calligraphy, I never interrupted my practical interrogation and research of calligraphy, whether Arabic, Latin or Chinese. I think researching Chinese calligraphy helped me to bring my own calligraphy into the painting zone. It helped me to understand the way great contemporary painters think about their practice, artists like Antonio Tapies, Robert Motherwell, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Pierre Alechinsky, Cy Twombly.


4. ‘My Chinese origins.’ When I was still a schoolboy during the 1960s, I collected Performance and Persona • Hassan Musa | 149


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