Kamala Ishag Receives Principal Prince Claus Laureate

Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, a Sudanese visual artist and a force in contemporary art, received the 2019 Principal Prince Claus Laureate by the Prince Claus Fund on 5 September 2019.

Annually, the Prince Claus Fund holds the Prince Claus Awards to honour visionary individuals and organisations for their ground-breaking work in fields of culture and development. The awards will take place at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, Netherlands on 4 December 2019. 

This year, the 2019 Prince Claus Laureates are all women or women-run organisations. However, the nominations were not gender-specified. According to the Prince Claus Fund, the nominations reflected a trend of exemplary women making strides in their fields around the world. 

Born in 1939, Ishag has been a pioneer in visual art in Sudan and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since the 1960s. About Ishaq, Prince Claus Fund writes:

‘Among the first women to graduate from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum, in 1960 she was a foundational figure in the modern art movement in Sudan. She was associated with the Khartoum School, which forged a modern artistic identity for the newly independent nation, drawing on both its Arab and African traditions. A decade later, Ishag’s ideas had evolved. She rejected the Khartoum School’s emphasis on heritage and its seemingly male-dominated world view. With a number of her students, she founded what came to be known as the Crystalist Group. Their manifesto (1976) characterised the world as infinite and unbounded, like a crystal with its transparencies, multiple angles and reflections. Her own work has focused on the intangible aspects of women’s lives in Sudan, Africa and the Arab worlds. Her interest in women’s lives led to field research and large-scale paintings of Zār, a traditional Sudanese women’s ceremony that entails spirit possession and trance-like performance. The works and writing of William Blake and Francis Bacon were a large influence in Ishag’s portraits of distorted figures. Ishag has remained active in organising exhibitions with younger generations of women artists. Hence her participation in current social movements where women play a central, visible role. She continues to be an intellectual catalyst and inspirational force among a younger generation of Sudanese artists.’

A solo exhibition, Women in Crystal Cubes, featuring the work of Principal Prince Claus Laureate Ishag, will open on 31 October 2019 at the Prince Claus Fund Gallery in Amsterdam. 

The Prince Claus Fund was established on 6 September 1996 as a tribute to HRH Prince Claus’s dedication to culture and development. The Prince Claus Fund supports artists, critical thinkers and cultural organisations in spaces where freedom of cultural expression is restricted by conflict, poverty, oppression, marginalisation or taboos, primarily in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.