A walk through Circle Art Gallery feels like standing in the stillness of mountain echoes: Quiet, yet resonant. Within that stillness, the works of Issam Hafiez radiate a warmth that both comforts and unsettles.
Nubian Tar, as the exhibition is titled, is a body of work that demonstrates a masterful command of stroke, balance, form, pattern, and colour. Nothing is accidental. Every detail feels deliberate.
Hafiez has the rare ability to make complexity appear effortless. His work carries depth without intimidation, inviting the viewer in even as it layers meaning beneath the surface. It is art that speaks softly yet lingers loudly.
With prices ranging between Sh77,550 and Sh1.3 million, Nubian Tar stands among the more premium exhibitions on the local circuit.
Yet to measure Hafiez’s work purely in monetary terms would be to miss the point. His dedication, lived experience, and artistic precision elevate the collection beyond price, into something far more enduring.
Nubian Tar pays homage to people and landscapes of Hafiez’s youth; the Nubian culture of farmers along riverbanks of the Nile intertwining with the desert into Egypt, the houses on the hills and the highlands with their white facades and the gentle sway of palm trees which are emboldened onto the fabric of his memories and alternatively onto the delicate tip end of his brush strokes on canvas.
It plays to his strength of merging patterns, figures and faces into landscapes with almost unnerving ease. A Hafiez painting is detailed intricacy at play.
Nubian Tar has been a work in progress. For the past three years after Hafiez relocated to Kenya from Sudan because of the war, some of the paintings which were done before the war have had to be collected and shipped from Khartoum, Egypt and London to Nairobi.
It is an exhibition that offers different shades and perspectives of the Sudanese artist, from dull to grayscale to colourful presentations.
The stories presented in the pictures are narratives from his childhood and his observation of the world he grew up in before and after the war in Sudan.
‘It is kind of focused on our country and the experience of having war wounds. Everything on these paintings, especially those done in the past three years, are expressions of myself against the war and my reflections on this situation’, he says.
The expressions are not as direct as a poem a song or a hard prose would look like. Beneath the colours and shades is masked pain and hurt at the needlessness of unnecessary wars.
‘If you go through a war and you have to relocate and stay alone without family and community, living becomes hard. War has had me kicked from my home and all this has come out to express itself in the exhibition. It was very hard for me because this is the first time I am doing an exhibition away from my home, and not by my choice.’
Nubian Tar also traces the evolution of Hafiez’s palette. His earlier works carry the deep ochre tones of the Nubian desert; the ‘tar’ that grounds the exhibition’s title. But over time, his canvases begin to open up into lighter, more vibrant hues.
This shift, he explains, was almost unconscious.
‘My artwork has changed because I came out of a war,’ he says. ‘In Kenya, I draw from the peace around me – the people, the environment. Art helps me express myself in ways that words never could. This exhibition feels like a beginning, like saying: I am still here.’
For Hafiez, the show is also a cry for help for Sudanese art which he says has been negatively affected by the war.
‘The war is working negatively against art and culture in Sudan because during this period, we have seen a lot of heritage sites being destroyed. I need not always talk about war but war is what I have, that is my situation.’
Hafiez, who also doubles up as a photographer, observes from his travelling that Africa is collectively suffering.
His travels across Central Africa, Mali, Ethiopia recording wars have had him conclude that for the most part, the citizenry is innocent, and that the influx of uncontrolled weapons is the disease that needs purging because of the atrocities it has enabled. This purging, he believes, will brought about by art.
‘Art will bring a revolution to this continent. It will unite the African people. My messaging isn’t for Sudan only, we have chronic wars in many parts of Africa. We need to work more as artists to create movements that will revolutionise ideologies against war,’ he says.