a.magazine’s African Interview Series

Khalid Kodi is a Sudanese artist and professor living in Boston. Through his paintings, sculptures, and installations, Kodi seeks to address the roots of violence, social injustice, intolerance and apathy, as well as confront cultural taboos such as female genital mutilation. “The situation I feel that my people are in requires us, or my generation [of artists], to be more involved and committed, to ask the big questions,” says Kodi. “Perhaps other people can answer them—if not now, then in the future.” His current project is a mixed-media work and installation addressing the construction of the Merowe Dam on the River Nile the Nubia region of Sudan. The completion of this dam, like the Aswan High Dam built during the 1960s, will displace tens of thousands of people and flood numerous archaelogical sites.

Kodi grew up in the city of Wad Majani. and studied painting at College of Fine Arts in Khartoum, from which he graduated in 1987. He later received his Master of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art. Kodi teaches fine art at Boston College and the Massachusetts College of Art, and his work has been exhibited throughout the world.

Interviewer Corin Hirsch was able to meet face-to-face with Khalid Kodi. Because of this, we have afforded her the opportunity to break free from our series’ seven-question style and bring you up close and personal with Kodi’s story and work.

You’re a Sudanese artist working in America. Where do you consider to be your home?

At some point, if you confront yourself you say, well, this is home, because I’ve been here for a long time, I’ve made lots of friends, I know my way around, I’m part of a community, and so this [Boston] is home. I’ve been able to produce my work, I was able to develop my ideas here, my thoughts, my technical skills and my schooling. And of course, I have my job. And so this is home. Artists, and all creative creatures, they have this conflict about their past and their present, and what they want to do in their future. I am not unique to that—I still have this conflict. To be practical, for now I feel this is home. Of course there is some advantage to being in the United States that is not necessarily available in African countries, and that is freedom, freedom of expression. That is essential for artists, for visual artists, and has been essential for the kind of work I’m doing. I would not be able to produce the same work that I’m producing in the United States if I was in any African country, or specifically if I was in Sudan. It would very much be impossible to do that for more than one reason—for technical reasons, and also for freedom of expression. A lot of these countries have limitations on artists so that they cannot express themselves freely. So, I’m grateful to be in the United States at this point in my career as an artist.

Do you travel to Africa frequently?

No, I have not been traveling for a long time. I had been doing lots of Egypt. But I haven’t been doing that for the last five years. Before that, I used to go Egypt every year. This is the only place I have been traveling to. Egypt is exciting in many ways.

So much of your work is tied to events in Sudan. What are your major sources of information in terms of the news from where you’re from?

I do lots of reading. My wife [Nada Ali, a human rights activist in New York] does a lot of traveling. I keep in touch with individuals who have been in Africa and come back. I also do my own investigations— I interview people. But basically I do lots of reading, lots of looking, I follow reports, I follow the news.

Can you comment on being a Sudanese artist working America? How does that inform your work?

I think for artists, it’s extremely difficult and almost impossible to get away from your past or to stay apart from where you are from and your history. Because your history is very much what formulates your visual memories, and this is how people can produce images, or ideas. Of course, this background and history is associated with your present, and understanding for your new environment and your understanding for new issues. But you always carry your history with you, you always carry your visual memories with you—the vocabulary that you use to have cohesive ideas about what you would like to say. On the other hand, the audience that you’re communicating with—not necessarily the audience you would communicate with when your home, if you were home in Africa or in Sudan especially—these are very much different audiences. Visual art is a universal language, like music in many ways, not like written words—like music. Because people relate to visual arts, they respond to images, and images are able to reach people. So if you’re creating an artwork, it doesn’t matter if you’re from New England or if you’re from South Africa—there is always this possibility to reach out through the visual. So, I would say people are affected by both their history and their present life.

Does it matter to you to share your work with people from where you’re from?

For the last 15 years, I have been traveling with my work all over the world, especially in Europe, in Egypt, Canada and all of North America. Of course I do shows for the mainstream art-interested public, but I take every single opportunity to communicate with my own Sudanese community. I developed—I wouldn’t say I’m a pioneer of—but I have been able to add visual arts in different Sudanese events. If they want to address a political issue, they have a party with a singer to sing nationalistic songs, and they have politicians who talk, and I am able to carry my work on slides or Powerpoint and represent it to people, address the issue via visual art. I have been doing lots of these lectures and talks. Often they generate lots of questions and are met with lots of feedback. People sometimes get tired of politicians and direct words. The fine arts asks questions, they don’t provide lots of answers, and I feel this is what I do—I challenge the mainstream thinking for many Africans and Sudanese. I challenge their absolute through visual images—through recreating these visual images and rearranging the creation of the visual images. Often that opens venues for dialogue and conversations. I have both good experience and bad experiences, because often I have people who became very mad at me for work I do, and they do not like it.

What is an instance of that?

I did an installation called Our Story. I painted lots of Sudanese leaders naked, nude. In 2002 I had been dealing with manmade famine, and I covered them with images of people who had been going through starvation, so that when you entered the gallery you’d see pictures of starving people. The idea was that people are used to these pictures, and they don’t move us anymore. Because they became ordinary, they have become emptied of power as images. I used those images to cover the well-known political, social and spiritual Sudanese leaders, and then I start to unveil them. People are then faced with these very well-known leaders, and some people got so mad at me. And I asked them, why do you get so mad when you look at images or pictures of those well-known Sudanese leaders, while you are not mad when you looked at anonymous Sudanese who are still naked and are still starving? So the work I am doing challenges this absolute, challenges what people are used to, challenges what people expect.

Is this an imperative for you, when you are conceiving a new work, to consider how it might challenge those who view it? Do you ever create work that is entirely personal to you? Or do you have work that lies somewhere between the political and personal? Are you able to separate the two?

I can’t, I consider that the personal. For lots of African people of my generation, post-colonial artists, we are faced with the idea that we have to do things ourselves. And we have a high level of commitment to our communities. We feel that it’s a mission—we get very committed to a cause and we stick with it and we address it so there is no separation between what we believe in and what we produce as work. So that’s why I continue to stick with being an artist, even though it’s very difficult to stick with and produce work and so forth, because I want to continue to do this kind of work, because it’s personal. When I do drawings of man-made famine, when I discuss issues of religion, when I do work with gender struggle—with all this work, I feel that it’s a mission, that it’s personal, that it’s my responsibility to do it. I don’t separate them. I don’t have political work and non-political or ‘easy’ work. I always say I’d love to paint a nice family with a suburban house and a dog, but the situation I feel that my people are in, requires us, or my generation, to be more involved and committed, and to ask the big questions, and perhaps other people can answer them—if not now, then in the future. Because you cannot imagine that in a country or continent that has a Rwandan genocide, then the genocide in southern Sudan, and now the Darfurian genocide—you cannot imagine the artists will still be painting beautiful roses. They move deeply with what is going on in their country or their community, and of course they move deeply with what is going on in the whole human arena. Historically, visual artists have been producing work that involves human situations, and I want to continue to do this kind of work.

How old were you when you left Sudan?

I left after college. I went to grad school here in 1993.

What about the people you went to school with at home, have many of them left the country or are they working in the country?

Lots of people in my generation, especially artists, writers and poets and novelists, lots of them are all over the world. Some of them are really brilliant artists. But they are all over the place.

Is your family still there?

I have a sister in Sudan, two brothers in Saudi Arabia, one brother in Germany, one brother in Canada and my mother in Canada.

What was your earliest memory of creating artwork? As a young artist, who influenced you the most?

I think lots of people in schools. I used to do lots of science drawings, and calligraphy, and some claywork, and so forth. That is my earliest solid memory of how I got into the arts. I used to do lots of calligraphy in Arabic, that’s before people had copiers. Family members—a few of my family members have beautiful handwriting, and my grandfather is a musician.

You play, don’t you?

I play the lute, I’m kind of frosty, as I have not practiced in a long time. He’s [my grandfather] perforrned police force music— this is how modern music entered Sudan. He plays everything. He’s one of the first people who knew how to read and write the Western musical notes, and he taught lots of people about that, like Sudanese singers. Through the British, the colonialization, they brought different instruments, like saxophones and other instruments, and also they brought with them people who can read and teach musical notes. So he’s one of the earliest people who did that.

I graduated from College of Fine Arts in Khartoum with a painting degree, so my baccelaurate was in painting. When I came to the United States I went to the Massachusetts College of Art, and I graduated with an MFA in painting. I interacted with a lot of colleagues and artists who were doing different work than painting. When you are in art school, you take many different kind of classes, in woodshop, and sculpture and so forth. I thought I could articulate my voice if I moved from 2D painting and its fundamental, traditional way into 3D possibilities where I can control the space. Often I use sound, and I use light, and I try to give a viewer who might enter one of my shows an experience, more of an understanding.

You’ve mentioned how you one carries their history with them. What are some of the visual memories of Sudan that you keep with you?

They come from stories. We grew up with the stories, the tradition of story telling is very strong in lots of African traditions and also strong in my own traition. I did not grow up in a village but I grew up in a city. We still sit around the grandmother and she will tell us stories. We have lots of images, and colors, and descriptions of creatures and people. And these stories are very magical in how you might perceive them. So these are the visual memories that people have—when people imagine crocodiles in the Nile, or night, and sand. This long tradition of storytelling is still strong in Sudan. People don’t have comics, they don’t have much television, there are lots of places they don’t even have electricity. This is their way of entertaining each other—stories.

When did you start doing installation work?

1997, 1998, around then. Though my heart is in painting.

What is your process when you are conceiving of a new work?

I do lots of reading and lots of research, and I do lots of sketching. When I say sketching, it doesn’t mean making a mark on a flat surface. Often I do sculpture sketches. Sometimes I use wood, sometimes I use wires, whatever I can get my hands on. Architects do similar things— lots of experimentation with light. I use different mediums and tools. Whatever tools are available to me, I use. I also work with lots of writers, people who write text for me. For instance, I did a show called “Secrets—A Visual Dialogue with Alice Walker.” For that show, Laura Benn wrote the text for it. Recently I have been doing lots of work with my wife,she writes the text for me. She’s a beautiful writer. She’s a human rights activist with Human Rights Watch, and she does lots of work on women’s issues and so forth. We were friends for a long time and we work together now.

Did you get the idea of your project on female circumcision from her?

No, that was before we got married. It’s an issue that lots of African males and females feel that they need to protest. There’s lots of people producing work spontaneously about the issue, about the subject matter. It’s one of those traditions that has been in Africa for such a long period of time that it’s been hard to confront this tradition and make change, make a difference with that.

I come up with my ideas, and I ask someone if they’d be interested to write the text for me. Of course I can write the text myself, but I like to broaden the possibilities of what people might get out of a show. People respond to creative products differently. Sometimes you find people who respond to fine art images, some people might respond to music, and some people respond to the written word. So that’s why I try to involve as many art forms as possible.

Can you talk about the Nubia project? What was its genesis, and how is it taking shape?

The Sudanese government doesn’t have a sense of historical value and heritage, and they propose to build a series of dams on the River Nile. In the 1960s they built a high dam at Aswan and they created what they called a massive lake that flooded a huge area of land that was very rich with archaehological objects. UNESCO has been very involved in moving lots of the Nubian and Egyptian archaeological sites. There is new research being done on that. But now with these new dams, the Khyber [check] dam they are building, they did not do enough research. And there is the issue of displacement, people having to move to new sites. The Sudanese government is a fascist government, it is a dictatorship in the worst sense. They don’t regard human beings, they don’t regard history—they regard what they think is right for them. So people from that part of the world, they protest and reject, they do not want those dams built, rather they want people to look for an alternative. There’s lot of corruption and lot of people who will benefit a great deal from building that dam. The Chinese government is pressing to build the dam, and other parties are involved as well. But the site is rich with archaeological objects and they did not do enough research and studies for the sites to see what objects are there. Of course there is the issue of historical ownership of this piece of land, how people develop a relationship with a place itself. They have heritage, they have history, they have stories, they have memories and so forth. And moving them, basically you will not destroy the generation that you move, but you will destroy the past generations— you will close the door on having future generations there as well. So that’s one of the issues I’m really involved and trying to contribute using different methods. The films are one of those things.

Who are you collaborating with?

My wife wrote the text. I did lots of projections of the Musuem of the National Center of Afro-American Artists [in Roxbury, Mass.] There, they have a replica of the burial chamber of King Aspelta [who governed Egypt and Nuba roughly 2500 years ago] It’s very beautiful. It’s very accurate in many ways. I did some projections onto the walls where they have the Egyptian book of the dead, and I did some projections onto the sarcophagus. You will see that in the film.

I’m working on building life-sized kings and designing huge tanks to show them inside the water. I’m also asking museums that have Nubian collections to allow me to project water into their collections. I haven’t got any answer yet (laughs). So I’m moving more towards this kind of work.

You involve social and political themes and human rights in much of your work. Do you teach your students to do the same, or do you concentrate on teaching them more technical aspects?

You’d be very surprised. The students are very smart, they’re very intelligent, and they want to contribute to the world somehow. They want to do something, they want to have a voice. So yes, since I am in the mainstream institutions, I teach the technical aspects – if I’m teaching a drawing class I teach them everything about drawing. But I found that the students I’m working with love to work with challenging subject matter — political, social or personal subject matter—as they explore their technical skills. And often my students are involved in some of the projects that I’m doing. For instance, the Tent of Foil [check]. Some of my students from Mass College of Art are very involved in painting the tents. And they love the project, you’d be very surprised how engaged they get in the process. I do both—I do the technical skills as much as I can, and then I try to involve them in asking these questions that I’m asking. Does it have to be about Africa, or about Asia? No, it could be about anything. But the process is the same, the process of critical thinking, and asking the challenging questions, and being part of a bigger world, beyond your small college or town or city or country. A lot of them, they want to be part of a bigger picture.

If you could meet any other African artist—sculptor, painter, writer, musician—who would it be, and why?

Well, lots of them. Though I’d rather see lots of work being produced by African artists more than meeting any particular individuals. I feel like there is a link that has been missing between my generation and the pos-colonial generation. During colonialism there were lots of artists working and producing work—some of them we know, some of them we don’t know, because they did not get exposure, noone wrote about them. I’m very curious about what they were doing. When I speak about doing installations, a lot of people think of these techniques as Western, and they’re not only Western art. Of course they contributed to it, but Africans have been doing performance installation long before it came to be shown in museums, before it was validated by the mainstream art critics. In Nuba, there are lots of religious ceremonies that involve an intricate level of preparation that involves painting and sculpting and symbolism— they even use smells. In Sudan they do lots of things like that.. You’ve probably seen my ‘Village of Fire’? That involved lots of body painting and preparation and so forth. So I would like very much to interview these unknown artists and sit down with them and know how they link mythological and metaphysical ideas to the ideas that people have– to bring it out to people.

To view Kodi’s personal gallery online, click here.