5-Star Exhibition in Dubai: Salah Elmur, Tracing Memory, Homeland and Belonging
Art Jameel presents Salah Elmur: ‘Just as the Heart of a Mango is a Stone’, a major solo exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai’s hub for contemporary art and ideas.
Salah Elmur (b. 1966; lives and works in Cairo) has built an artistic journey deeply entwined with Sudanese cultural heritage, echoing the pioneering spirit of the Khartoum School and modernist movements across African and Arab diasporas. Inspired by his upbringing near the Blue Nile in Khartoum, Elmur’s work captures the rich history and multiplicities of Sudanese life through compositions that merge figurative abstraction with intimate familial themes.
On view from November 1, 2026, to March 14, 2027, the exhibition brings together paintings, archival photographs, sketches, and ephemera spanning the last decade of his practice. The presentation features loans from major regional and international collections, including the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection and the Saudi Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA).
Rooted in the photographic legacy of the artist’s family studio, Studio Kamal in Khartoum, Elmur’s work engages deeply with Sudanese cultural heritage while echoing the pioneering spirit of the Khartoum School and modernist movements across African and Arab diasporas. His compositions blend figurative abstraction with familial themes, offering an immersive encounter where memory, landscape, and identity merge. Together, the works trace his evolving relationship with his homeland across years of distance and political upheaval.
Elmur’s vivid paintings intertwine memory and myth, drawing heavily on his upbringing near the Blue Nile in Khartoum. Archival images are repurposed and reimagined, capturing subjects first through the lens of a camera, then again through paint. Throughout the exhibition, artworks carry the trace of his signature formal language—images that double and refract, mirroring the artist's own negotiation of distance and memory.