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 and exiled 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, consecrating from a museum point of view the artist, who is also directly involved from a curatorial point of view for some of his site-specific installations. Khalid Albaih, ICORN guest artist in Copenhagen (International Cities of Refuge Network) 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.
Sudan has experienced a multifaceted crisis that has exacerbated since 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. The UN says the war has triggered the "world's worst hunger crisis".