Event
Khalid Albaih: The Season of Migration to the North
Italy
9 November 2024 - 23 February 2025
Santa Giulia Museum
Brescia, Italy
ARC is honored to collaborate with the Santa Giulia Museum for The Season of Migration to the North, presenting - for the first time - a critical solo exhibition of Khalid Albaih's decades-long work as a dissident artist.
The title of the exhibition echoes the title of the novel of the same name by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, whose narrative voice acts as the leitmotif of the exhibition project. For Sudanese literature, but African literature in general, this novel with its evocative title was pivotal for post-colonial culture.
The installation, while including some works already showcased in New York and Copenhagen exhibitions, dialogues with the city of Brescia and its peculiarities. Khalid Albaih, ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network) guest artist in Copenhagen and a fellow in the USA for the Artists at Risk Connection, investigates the different facets that accompany the ‘season of migration to the North’: from the identification of a place as home to the confrontation with the foreigner, from the vision that the so-called West (a term that is no longer geographical, but ideological) has of Africa, to the marks that each journey imprints on the memory.
As described in ARC's report Art Is Power: 20 Artists on How They Fight for Justice and Inspire Change, Khalid traces the beginning of his career as a political cartoonist to 2011, publishing his cartoons in the Facebook page Khartoon! - an amalgam of “cartoon” and Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum - as his work was rejected by newspapers who worried it was too searing. During the Arab Spring, his cartoons rose in popularity and were shared around the globe. Khalid explained, “I don't focus on Sudan. I do a cartoon which is about Sudan for me, but for other people it could be about wherever they're from as well, because they are the same.” This interview was conducted before April 2023 when violent clashes erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, resulting in the displacement of more than 14 million people, including internally displaced people, asylum seekers and refugees. As of November 2024, Sudan faces a critical point with the UN declaring the war has triggered the "world's worst hunger crisis."