In Brescia, the works of Sudanese dissident Khalid Albaih: art and activism on display

The Municipality of Brescia, Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Peace Festival present Khalid Albaih. The Season of Migration to the North, a solo exhibition dedicated to Sudanese artist, curator and activist Khalid Albaih (Bucharest, 1980), curated by Elettra Stamboulis. The exhibition will be open to the public from Nov. 8, 2024 to Feb. 23, 2025 at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia. The new exhibition continues Fondazione Brescia Musei’s journey, begun in 2019, to bring to the Museo di Santa Giulia some of the most incisive voices of the international art scene, with a focus on the encounter between contemporary art and human rights.

The aim of the review is to propose a space for dissident artists and activists, figures often ignored by the official art market but followed by a global community that values social criticism and the imagination of new horizons. Part of the Brescia Peace Festival, the exhibition represents the fifth stage of the research conducted by Fondazione Brescia Musei, which has presented, again under the curatorship of Elettra Stamboulis, Zehra Doğan ’s 2019 solo shows We Will Also Have Better Days, Badiucao China Is Not Near in 2021, Victoria Lomasko ’s The Last Soviet Artist in 2022, and the group show Until We Are Free made in 2023, dedicated to five Iranian women artists. The title of the exhibition pays homage to Sudanese writer Altayib Salih’s novel, a masterpiece of post-colonial literature that serves as a narrative framework for the project. Season of Migration to the North traces Albaih’s artistic evolution and offers for the first time a complete retrospective of his production, including some works presented in exhibitions in New York and Copenhagen, and new site-specific installations for Brescia. An ICORN guest artist in Copenhagen and fellow of Artists at Risk, Albaih explores themes of identity, migration and the West’s perception of Africa. The aim of the exhibition is thus to return a deep and multifaceted picture of the migratory condition.

Albaih has established himself as a cartoonist and illustrator under the pseudonym Khartoon, a pun combining cartoon and Khartoum. His sharp, incisive drawings quickly spread online and led him to participate in high-profile international projects, such as The Story of Civil Rights is Unfinished in the United States and the collective project on the art and history of Sudan done for the German Cultural Institute. In 2019, the Institute of German Culture in Khartoum commissions Albaih to create a collective project that results in the creation of an art book focused on the history of Sudan, in the production of which thirty Sudanese artists participate. In 2020, he created a virtual space for struggling artists with When The World Closed. His mission then continues in Kassel at Documenta 2022 with The Walls Have Ears, a sound installation dedicated to asylum seekers in Denmark. The artistic research of Albaih, now living in Oslo, combines a rigorous curatorial approach with a strong civic commitment and also involves the Brescia Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Comics in this exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Skira, which for the first time presents Albaih’s work in Italian.

In Brescia, the works of Sudanese dissident Khalid Albaih: art and activism on display

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