A major conference on Sudanese art and culture will take place in Sharjah this weekend.
Planned as a precursor to a major exhibition of modern Sudanese art that will happen next year, the conference, hosted by the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, will focus on the 1960s and 1970s in Sudan. This period of time witnessed the rise of several modernist movements that radically transformed the literary and artistic scenes in the African country. The most influential among these movements were The Khartoum School (Madrasat al Khartoum) in the visual arts and the School of the Bush and the Desert (Madrasat al Ghaba wa al Sahra') in literature, a movement that also influenced the work of several artists of the Khartoum School who will be included in the upcoming exhibition.
Through a series of moderated talks and panel discussions, the conference titled Modernity and the Making of Identity in Sudan: Remembering the Sixties and Seventies, will cover topics like 'Music, Nationalism and Popular Culture in Sudan', 'Modern and Contemporary Visual Arts', 'Theatre Experiments', 'Cinema and the Film Industry' and 'The Nation, Identity and the Literary Imagination'.
The conference represents an effort to bring together some of the major figures who have shaped the literary and artistic scenes of the 1960s and 1970s with younger generations of scholars, artists, and literary and art critics, while providing a platform for documentation and critical investigation of this important period. There will be a publication produced afterwards with a selection of essays by participants and reprints of major documents and archival material related to these movements.
* Modernity and the Making of Identity in Sudan: Remembering the Sixties and Seventies will take place at Sharjah Institute for Theatrical Arts, Al Mureijah, Sharjah from tomorrow until Sunday. For more info visit www.sharjahart.org
