Visual arts of Sudan
The visual arts of Sudan encompass the historical and contemporary production of objects made by the inhabitants of today's Republic of the Sudan and specific to their respective cultures. This encompasses objects from cultural traditions of the region in North-East Africa historically referred to as the Sudan, including the southern regions that became independent as South Sudan in 2011.
Throughout its history, Sudan has been a crossroads between North Africa, Egypt, Mediterranean cultures, parts of West Africa and the Red Sea coast in the east of the country. Before the 20th century, these cultural traditions were influenced by indigenous African, Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Byzantine and Arabic cultures that have brought about a large diversity of cultural expressions, often specific to the ethnic or social group that produced and used them. As expressions of the material culture of a society, applied arts and handicrafts are included with the fine arts in this history of the arts in Sudan.
Starting in the early 19th century, the establishment of first the Turkish-Egyptian and later the Anglo-Egyptian rule, characterised by foreign military and political domination, ushered in the gradual evolution of a modern nation state with new cultural influences on the lifestyles and material culture of the Sudanese.
After independence in 1956, Sudanese graduates of the colonial education system took over leading positions in the new state and thus contributed to the emergence of urban culture and modern art. These cultural developments became most visible from the 1950s to the 1980s, a period that was later called "The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan".
In the 21st century, visual artistic developments in the country have been characterised by digital forms of communication, including audio-visual art spread and received through satellite television, online media as well as images and films shared through social media. During the Sudanese Revolution of 2018 and 2019, young artists contributed to the protests and morale of the popular movement, creating wall paintings, graffiti, cartoons, photographs or video messages.
Historical periods preceding contemporary Sudan
Prehistoric times
The oldest existent objects of material artifacts in Nubia, such as stone tools, date back to prehistoric times. The Sabu-Jaddi rock art site is a unique cluster of more than 1600 rock drawings from different historical periods expanding for more than 6000 years through different eras of Nubian civilization. The well-preserved drawings represent wild and domestic animals, humans and boats and were included by the World Monuments Fund in its list of monuments to watch. Other ancient rock drawings were found in the arid valley known as Wadi Abu Dom in the Bayuda Desert. Another important prehistoric site was found in the border region between Sudan, Libya and Egypt in the Gabal El Uweinat mountain range. In Sudan's western region, the Jebel Mokram Group, characterized by its pottery and small clay figures of animals, was a prehistoric, Neolithic culture that flourished in the second millennium BCE.Kerma and the Kingdom of Kush
From the Kerma culture, the seat of one of the earliest civilizations of ancient Africa, weapons, items of pottery and other household objects are presented in museums such as the National Museum of Sudan, Kerma Museum, British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.File:Lion_temple_relief,_Naga_.jpg|thumb|Lion temple relief, depicting Natakamani and Amanitore at Naqa
During the Kingdom of Kush, when the monarchs of Kush ruled their northern neighbour Egypt as pharaos for over a century, Nubian statues like the sphinx of Taharqa acquired Egyptian features and were erected in temples or Nubian pyramids, such as in Meroe, one of Sudan's World Heritage Sites. Among other resources, the material culture of ancient Nubia used gold, ivory, ebony, incense, hides or precious stones, and necklaces or bracelets have been found in tombs of royal families. Nubian kings and queens, the latter called Kandakes of Kush, were represented in stone reliefs on temples, like the one dedicated to Apedemak at Naqa. Other examples of ancient Nubian architecture are rock-cut temples, mud-brick temples called deffufa, graves with stoned walls or dwellings made of mudbricks, wood and stone floors, palaces and well laid out roads.
Influences by Greco-Roman culture
From the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, northern Nubia was invaded and annexed to Egypt, which was ruled by the Ptolemaic Kingdom and later the Roman Empire. Cultural influences of this period as far south as in Nubia can be seen in the so-called 'Roman baths' in Meroe, an excavated building called "an outstanding example of cultural transfer between the African kingdom and the Greco-Roman culture of the Mediterranean."Another example of cultural influence from Nubia during Ptolemaic rule in Egypt is a marble head of a Nubian young man, probably made in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and now exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum in the US.
File:Autor_nieznany,_Archanioł_Michał_-_górna_część_postaci._Malowidło_ścienne.jpg|thumb|Archangel Michael, Faras, 9th cent. in National Museum Warsaw
Medieval Nubia
In medieval Nubia, the inhabitants of the Christian kingdoms Makuria, Nobadia, and Alodia produced distinct forms of architecture, like the Faras Cathedral, sculptures, and wall paintings, of which more than 650 have been published in modern scholarly texts. These relate to the Coptic art of Egypt, and sometimes to Ethiopian art. They used the Old Nubian language, Coptic, Greek or Arabic for different religious or secular texts, preserved on manuscripts or as inscriptions on sandstone, marble or terracotta.Even though Muslim migrants, probably merchants and artisans, are confirmed to have settled in Lower Nubia from the 9th century onwards, the actual Islamization of Nubia began in the late 14th century.
Arrival of Islam and Arabization
In the 16th and 17th centuries, new Islamic kingdoms were established – the Funj Sultanate and the Sultanate of Darfur, starting a long period of gradual Islamization and Arabization in Sudan. These sultanates and their societies existed until the Sudan was conquered by the Ottoman Egyptian invasion in 1820, and in the case of Darfur, even until 1916.Major cultural changes of this period were marked by the adoption of the Islamic religion and growing use of the Arabic Language as elements of everyday life. Other cultural developments were reported by foreign visitors such as Frédéric Cailliaud and relate to the architecture of towns and mosques, the manufacture of weapons like throwing knives or kaskara swords – and the slave trade. In this period, schools for the Arabic language and for Islamic studies, called khalwa, were founded and Sufi brotherhoods took roots in Sudan. Examples of their material culture are a flag with the Islamic statement of faith, now in the British Museum, or a wooden tablet of the late 19th century, used as writing board for students learning the Quran, presented online by the Brooklyn Museum, New York City.
The 19th and 20th century until independence
From the beginning of the 19th century onwards, drawings or photographs, taken by foreign visitors, constitute some of the earliest records for the traditional arts of different ethnic and social groups, such as architecture, dress, hairstyles, jewellery or scarifications.After the first period of Turkish-Egyptian rule, the Mahdist State left important traces in Omdurman, one of the three major areas of greater Khartoum. The tomb of the Mahdi, the Khalifa House, Mahdist coins and specific types of dress, like the jibba coat worn by the Mahdi's followers, bear witness to the cultural character of this period.
In the early 19th century, Egyptians, British and other foreign inhabitants of Khartoum had expanded the city from a military encampment to a town of hundreds of brick-built houses. And during the condominium of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the British army and civil administration ushered in important changes in the society, economy and culture.
The British administration also introduced a Western system of education, with Gordon Memorial College for higher learning and Art Education in schools, and a School of Design opened in 1945.This is regarded as the start for the development of modern art in Sudan, and painting or sculpture in the Western sense began to take roots. Historian Heather J. Sharkey made the following comment on the influence of visual culture through the British educational system: "Photographs and pictures enabled the boys and Old boys of Gordon College to see and hence to imagine the world, the British Empire, and the Sudan in new ways, visual culture was as important to the development of nationalism as the culture of words." It was precisely in the emerging visual art of documentary films that Gadalla Gubara, said to have been the first Sudanese cameraman, was trained for the Colonial Film Unit.
To train teachers, especially for vocational training, an art course was introduced in the Institute of Education in 1943 and three years later, a School of Design was established. In 1951, this school was moved to the Khartoum Technical Institute, and in 1971, it became the College of Fine and Applied Art of the Sudan University of Science and Technology. Despite considerable setbacks caused mainly by the neglect of several governments, it continues into the early 2020s and is the place where many of Sudan's modern visual artists and musicians have started their artistic education.
Traditional applied arts and crafts
In accordance with contemporary notions of material culture of any social group, the terms traditional arts, folk arts, applied arts, crafts or handicrafts refer to a wide range of cultural objects made by humans. Apart from the so-called Fine Arts, this applies to such diverse Sudanese creations of textiles and dress, including the traditional galabiya, turbans and skullcaps for men or the veils and toub for women, to shoes and other kinds of leatherwork such as sandals, leather talismans containing sacred script or to jewellery and other kinds of personal adornment, like henna ornaments on hands or ankles. Sudanese traditions of woodwork, pottery or metalcraft can be found in traditional furniture like the angareeb bedsteads, in earthenware vessels for drinking water placed outside private houses, as containers for burning incense or as traditional coffee pots called jabana.In 2017, cultural anthropologist Griselda El Tayib published her book Regional Folk Costumes of the Sudan with illustrations of dress and other kinds of personal adornment from different ethnic groups of Sudan. Also, ethnic traditions of body art such as cicatrizations, hairstyles, like braids or the so-called fuzzy-wuzzy hairstyles of Hadendoa men, modern dreadlocks and make-up have been or still are in everyday use. On the same topic, The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture cautions that "By the 1990s many of Sudan's traditional arts were under threat from modernization and the importation of mass-produced goods."
In a 2013 interview in El Fasher, Darfur, art historian Gibreel Abdulaziz spoke about the long history and development of local handicrafts and art forms such as rock painting, engraving on stone and leather or calligraphy. Citing examples from his 700-page book on the history of El Fasher and its historical development, he described the evolution of these traditional artistic practices over time, as well as modern developments of the arts in Darfur until the 21st century.