In her painting Bait al-Mal, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag presents us with the neighbourhood in Khartoum where she grew up during the 1940s and 50s. This large, mostly dusky canvas presents us with clusters of figures in a kind of diagram of their connections and interrelatedness. Instead of streets and corners, we trace winding, branching webs of family and friendships and associations. We’ll never get to the end of them in these looping, bifurcating and fracturing lines. All around the edge of the painting are simplified trees, and it is their tangle of spreading roots that provide the skein of these relationships. A lovely, fanciful painting, Bait al-Mal is a memory map as much as it is a description of a place. The Sudanese painter was, I think, also telling herself a story, and as much as she was drawing with a brush she was also remembering, and making things up as she went along, losing and re-finding herself along the paths her mind took.
There was, apparently, one corner of the neighbourhood that the local children, and doubtless some adults too, were afraid of: the house of a man who was possessed by a Djinn or spirit. Look closely and all you see are a homely couple seated to either side of a tree-trunk. I only know about this small detail because the artist told the curator, and the curator told me. This how rumours are spread, and this one has been doing the rounds now for a lifetime. Maybe it has been told for generations, centuries, millennia. I like this thought very much.
