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They Always Appear

Ibrahim El-Salahi 

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Curated by: Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani
November 18th, 2025 - March 20th, 2026

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IAIA is pleased to present They Always Appear, the first institutional survey exhibition of Ibrahim El-Salahi (b.1930) in the US. 

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IAIA is honored to present They Always Appear, Ibrahim El-Salahi’s first Institutional survey in America. This exhibition unfolds a selection of seminal drawings and paintings including never-seen works created during his early career in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1930, El-Salahi is a visionary modernist and cultural diplomat who played a pivotal role in catalyzing a cultural renaissance across the Arab and African worlds. As a creative and intellectual luminary, El-Salahi’s early career was shaped by prestigious academic and professional experiences, including studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, a UNESCO Fellowship in the Global South, and the Rockefeller Fellowship at Columbia University in New York City. They Always Appear reveals the interwoven relationship between El-Salahi’s cosmopolitan sensibility and the cultural depth of the Arab, Islamic, and African worlds—layering imagination, spiritualism, figuration, abstraction, and symbolism to herald a new era in global modernism.

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Grounded in his childhood studies of the Qur’an and Arabic calligraphy, El-Salahi developed a singular visual language, recognizing the abstract potential of the figure within Arabic letters. His work navigates the tensions and affinities between modernism and the historical continuum of Islamic aesthetics, offering a visual vocabulary that is deeply his own, yet inherently transnational. In alignment with the principle of multiplicity, literary connotations are often woven into his practice, as he explores the inextricable interplay between drawing and literature. 

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During his tenure at the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Sudan, El-Salahi was a key founding member of the Khartoum School—a movement determined to disrupt colonial frameworks by forging a new visual language rooted in Sudanese aesthetics. The works from this period probe the depths of cultural symbolism, juxtaposed with biomorphic forms, new modes of expression. Uniting manifold mediums and conceptual chapters across four decades of El-Salahi’s career, this exhibition unveils El-Salahi’s unique aesthetic, an amalgamation of iconographies that hail from diverse civilizations, declaring a perennial and innovative perspective on global modernism.

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Bio: Born in Sudan in 1930, Ibrahim El-Salahi is one of the most important living African artists and a key figure in the development of African Modernism. El-Salahi grew up in Omdurman, Sudan and studied at the Slade School in London. On his return to Sudan in 1957, he established a new visual vocabulary, which arose from his own pioneering integration of Sudanese, Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions. Tate Modern’s 2013 retrospective of El-Salahi’s work was the Museum's first exhibition dedicated to Africa Modernism. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum, London; Tate Modern, London; The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Newark Museum, Newark; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; The National Gallery, Berlin and many others.

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