Hassan Musa

- 1 SALAH HASSAN AND ELSABETGIORGIS Hassan Musa's Graphic Ceremonies Salah Hassan ince the late 1980s, Hassan Musa, the French-based Sudanese artist, has been working on what he calls Graphic Ceremonies, a series of public performances, which deconstructs the idea of exhibition as a ritual and exposes its essence as a theatrical spectacle. During these performances, Musa executes large paintings on pre-printed fabrics spread on the floor or walls of the gallery and invites the audience's participation. Through these performances, Musa redirects the audience's focus to the very process involved in making the work, rather than the often-fetishized art object. In the early 1990s, Musa combined these performances with what he calls "Mail Art." In regular correspondence with colleagues and friends, Musa uses mixed media on mailed envelopes, transforming their surfaces into plastic works. He creates themed collages by using the cover of the envelope with the stamps as a base for a design, adding to it old stamps and photographs painted over with pen ink and color. Musa is a prolific artist whose works and performances have been included in many international exhibitions including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England, 1995; the Malmo Kunsthall, Sweden, 1996; Under a Different Sky, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1996, and Modernities and Memories in the Venice Biennale of 1997. Hassan Musa currently works and lives in Domessargues in the south of France. Born in 1951, he graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Art of Khartoum Polytechnic (formerly KTI) in 1976. He traveled to France in the late 1970s and earned a doctorate in fine art and art history from Montpellier University. Since 1982, Musa, himself an accomplished calligrapher, has been directing workshops intended to initiate children and adults into different types of calligraphy. He also participated in theater performance through conception and execution of improvised calligraphy on stage during the choreographic show Ballet Naile, which toured in France, Spain and Algeria. In addition to being a teacher and an educator, Musa has illustrated several books of Sudanese folktales for both children and adults. In recent years, he has published limited editions of what he calls "artist books" in linoprint. The critical appropriation of classical Western masterpieces is an ongoing theme in the art of Hassan Musa. Since the early 1990s, Musa has taken on biblical themes popularized in Renaissance paintings, creating his own versions in a critical and satirical style. These are mostly large paintings executed in textile ink on printed cloth. In his latest series, entitled the New Testament, he deals with biblical themes such as The Last Supper and The Annunciation, creatively blending the designs of the fabric with his own painting. In Self Portrait as Saint Sebastian, 1999, Saint Sebastian of the Sunflower, 1999, and Family Album, 1998, Musa takes on the martyrdom of San Sebastian, a central theme in Renaissance art, and processes it into a surrogate image that criticizes the hegemonic presence of Western culture. The ambiguity associated with the images of Saint Sebast ian—commonly depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows—allows the artist to replace him with such latter-day icons as Che Guevara and Van Gogh, whose lives evoke complex reactions of guilt and blame no less powerful than those created by Saint Sebast ian's act of martyrdom . Musa's earlier performance and installation work, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1997 (included in the 1997's Venice Biennale's exhibition, Modernities and Memories) is a triptych executed in three large printed fabric panels painted over with textile ink. The two paintings on the sides depict an angel carving a bow, inspired by a work of the late Italian Renaissance painter Parmigianino, from the Mannerist period. The central work represents Saint Sebastian in a pose and a composition that are influenced by the depiction of the Saint in the Renaissance painter Titian's Resurrection Altarpiece, 1522, which in turn reveals the influence of Michelangelo. Saint Sebastian was an early Christian believed to have been martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian. Sebast ian's martyrdom was a favorite subject of Renaissance artists, and it was 1 0 6 - N k a Journal of Contemporary...