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ASRAR: A Visual Dialogue with Alice Walker is a critical reflection on cultural mores that Khalid Kodi, agrees with Alice Walker, is outdated and moribund. "Asrar" is a word that means 'secret', codes secrets, preserves secrets, and allows secret acts to be performed on concealed hidden parts of the body. Honoring the tears and terror that accompanied genital surgeries, the installation shines a harsh, yet understanding light on a practice that has outlived its time. In Kodi's view, engaging the conditions of the secret, confronting it, openly discussing it, defines self-critical stance against the practice. Speaking in complex layered tones, Kodi's "asrar" of genital surgery is a pathway into another asrar, the well-kept global secret of Sudan's internal war. This 40 year civil war that has inflicted large scale catastrophic devastation has attracted little discussion. As Laura Beny mentioned in her historical essay (see page 3 of Kodi's exhibition), the conflict has claimed 1.9 million lives genesis a regional scale of , the little discussed war of Sudan. Today, Sudan has produced more internally displaced people than many other regional conflict areas of the world, that new meanings and new definitions of citizenship, refugee status, and displacement are called forth. Khalid Kodi's paintings, mixed media works, sculpture and installations are richly textured commentaries that both address the sufferings of Sudanese and articulate the roots of the nation's trauma. He tries to answer the "why" question, and in the process raises difficult questions about social and political conventions, religious dogmas, taboos, leadership style and the national psyche. Looking scornfully at various garbs of oppression worn by zealots, he roundly critiques religious intolerance, bigotry, and the violence they unleashed in promoting ideals that disregard persons defined as "others" and "unbelievers." Though eloquent in his sociopolitical critiques, Kodi's artistic vision seems to have been well-served by his sharp political critiques. Creating with clarified vision, he achieves optical depth through carefully manipulating media surfaces and textural qualities. A wrenching slide show of displaced people is projected on individually fabricated gray tiles, embossed with human hands, that symbolically represent the lives lost in an endless cycle of war. A makeshift cone-shaped cage draped with fabric, in which plaster cast hands eerily grope towards a light, creates a disquieting yet visually effective scene of great intensity. The general air of foreboding that seems to pervade aspects of the installations are wonderfully ameliorated by the light fanciful mythological scenes, captured by the richly detailed transparent layers of his paintings. Khalid Kodi grew up in the city of Wad Madani, Sudan where his family was prominent in the arts, especially music and poetry. With encouragement from his teachers and family, he embarked on a career in art. He studied at the College of fine Arts, in Khartoum where he graduated in 1987, and upon migrating to the United States in the late 1980s, he obtained a graduate degree in fine Arts in 1993 from the Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston, MA. He lives in Boston, and teaches at both Brown University and Boston College. His works are in several private and public collections in the US and abroad. |
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2000 Africa Resource Center. All rights reserved.
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