05/03/2022
As part of our global visual cultures series, we are honored to present the works of Hassan Musa, a world-renowned Sudanese multidisciplinary artist. Musa is best known for endowing traditional painting techniques with new meanings. His zoomorphic calligraphy, which is the illustrative form of lettering that shapes into the features of animals, is the most prominent of his work. This unique style is seen in various works, including the illustrated book Alphabet De Scheherazade, where it’s considered a masterful visualization of 1001 Arabian Nights through the lens of 28 women, each depicted with a different letter of the Arabic alphabet.
Musa firmly believes that with calligraphy comes a great power, one that can be used politically. At the time of the Civil War in Sudan and the increasing media censorship arising, Musa had fled to France and started publishing a magazine called J.H.N.M. short for Jaridat Al Hadm al Naqqad wal Muarda (The Newspaper of Deconstructive Criticism and Opposition) that was distributed in an underground circulation system where he would only give it to a trusted selection of people. They would make copies until it had been smuggled into Sudan and an underground movement emerged at the intersection of art and politics. The title جهنم was a play on words with the Coca-Cola script - the arabic initials of the magazine, in addition to the appropriated use of the Shell logo to act as a dot for the letter Geem, but cropped to read Hell.
