In Conversation with Mohamed Omer Bushara

Alex Rotas

Mohamed Omer Bushara is a generous conversationalist: articulate and forthcoming about the sorrows and joys of a life marked by displacement, exile and, above all, an over-riding and enduring passion for art. However, just as his imagery is elusive and complex, Bushara will not be tied down in conversation either, resisting any classification (or “pigeon-holing” as he calls it) of his work. We met in early 2004 when Bushara was one of three artists showing work in Asylum Years, an exhibition in Oxford, foregrounding distinguished practitioners who had sought asylum in the UK. I was researching contemporary visual artists who were also refugees in this country. Whilst characteristically obliging in both showing his work and talking to me on the basis of his personal biography, Bushara was not going to allow simplistic anecdotal details on the one hand or notions of ethnic or experiential essentialism on the other to be offered as ‘explanations' for his art. Having exhibited under the banner of ‘African art', ‘Arab art', ‘Middle-Eastern art', ‘Black art' and now ‘Asylum art', he is well aware that the process of labelling limits both artist and viewer, serving instead the interests of a commodity-driven market. Neither does he have any time for whether or not he is a ‘modernist' or ‘postmodernist'; having been described as both, he shrugs off either category. People can describe him as they please, what concerns him is the integrity of his own continuously evolving experimentation with whatever medium, surface and ideas he is working with.

Bushara's work consists of etchings, prints, collagraphs and paintings (using inks, colours and found objects) and indeed even the latter have a printerly quality to them. His relationship with his chosen surface is intimate, personal. You have to respect the surface, he says, and be sensitive to how it is responding to you: as he works, he engages in a dialogue with his surface which becomes more complex as he builds up more marks upon it. “Sometimes the dialogue stops and then I leave it for a while, not forcing my will upon it,” he says. He is confident that something meaningful will emerge even if, when he starts, he does not know exactly what. He draws pleasure from the ambiguities inherent in these uncertain certainties, the surprises that come out of what he describes as “the chaos of the interaction” between his materials and the surface at hand. Often working without an image or formal composition in his mind, he nonetheless enjoys knowing that the marks he makes will be both free - “dancing on the surface” as he puts it - and controlled at the same time.

This notion of being simultaneously both free and yet in control, and its association with dance, is very important to Bushara. Talking about his fascination with contemporary dance, he describes a seminal experience at the Slade where he was a postgraduate student in the mid 1970s:
The sculptor Barry Flanagan came to the Slade as a visiting artist. He brought with him two dancers (a woman and a man) and played classical music in an empty studio. There was nothing there except for the whiteness and poetry of the bodies and our hunger to capture these two bodies in our drawings. They were floating in the emptiness of the room carried by the rich fabric of the music and, unlike drawing from a sitting model, here, with the dancers moving, our lines became freer and more dynamic, rather than dead and academic. We all belonged to the moment; we were both free and committed, serious yet full of joy.

Bushara's compositions reflect these apparent polarities. They are carefully worked and reworked, fine lines fastidiously and closely drawn in some works, sweeping brush strokes and splodges of ink in others. The marks are chaotic, but this is organised chaos; they may be anarchical and turbulent but they are far from random. Even at their most exuberant and apparently spontaneous, there is a palpable sense that the artist has choreographed the process to produce a sense of order and structure to the final piece. Not that Bushara approaches each work in the same way. “Sometimes,” he says, “I have ideas and I work on these ideas and sometimes I just attack the surface and sometimes I just play, enjoying the marks on the white paper.”

His series of drawings A Woman Offering Her Child to Silence (2003) grew from one of these ideas that were preoccupying him at the time. This was the suffering of women and children in countries like Iraq and Ethiopia where children were dying because of a lack of medicines in the former and because of famine in the latter. Mothers were left with nothing but the dead body of their child in their hands, a body they must now offer to the void that is death. Bushara agrees that this particular series is a form of ‘protest art', high in political content. So is he a ‘political artist', I ask? Bushara won't be drawn:
Sometimes you have the burden of other people's suffering; sometimes you are just enjoying yourself; sometimes it's just like strolling about in a familiar neighbourhood. But all art is political, in the broad sense of the term. And even for people who are suffering, there is more to their lives than this suffering alone. They need hope. They need to feel more human. We can't spend all our lives lamenting. We need hope because with hope we will be more equipped to change. And art is part of the tools of change: it is part of a right and healthy society where people have everything they need.

Most of his work is untitled, however. No hints, no guidelines: the viewer is left to make of it what he or she will. Although Bushara is characteristically ambivalent in describing his work as both representational and abstract, the high level of abstraction of many of his paintings in particular certainly offer ample scope for the viewer to find whatever he or she is looking for within them. At an exhibition of his work at Modern Art Oxford (2004) I was interested to overhear at least two different sets of viewers discuss how clearly they could ‘see' he was an exile from his paintings. “It's so obvious,” said one. Personally, the pleasing sense of completion in his densely worked compositions shows no evidence of rupture to me, but then I have met this dignified and modest artist himself and, having done so, rupture would be the last thing I would be looking for. Does he feel like an outsider, I ask? “I have always been an outsider,” he says.
As an artist I was an outsider in Sudan as I didn't study at the Khartoum Technical College so I am not considered to be part of the contemporary Sudanese art movement. I am not included in the mainstream in my country. But this makes me freer, in a sense. I'm like a nomad. I need the wilderness but I'm still happy to be part of the human race. Whenever and wherever I find people who like my work, I really appreciate it. As far as displacement is concerned, I have always felt displaced, even within my own country.

At the time of writing, after eighteen years of exile in Saudi Arabia and now five and a half years in the UK, Bushara and his family are still awaiting a decision as to whether their leave to remain has been granted. As an artist, however, issues of identity don't concern him one jot. Have the different places he has lived in influenced him and his work? “I don't know how they have influenced it,” he replies.
I don't go to see things and then put them in my work. They will come, but I don't know how or when. And for me, painting is not ‘painting'. It is part of life, part of creativity, part of the whole thing. I read a lot, I carry on researching, I write poetry, I used to go to the theatre, I like contemporary dancing. I absorb it all. And one way or another, it all comes out in my work.

Tempting though it may be, therefore, to look for biographical clues in Bushara's work, the test and the pleasure for the viewer lies in freeing the mind of expectation, just as Bushara himself does when he approaches each new, empty surface. Trusting one's own responses to the densely worked images to emerge, rather than looking for clues to the artist's life, opens up the work to new and unexpected possibilities of enjoyment. A new personal dialogue with the shapes, patterns, colours, textures and figures can now develop: our own. As viewers, we can take our cue from an artist who delights in making marks dance freely across the surface, improvising yet adhering to some underlying structure at the same time. Our pleasure in looking at these images is similarly enhanced if we let our own minds run free, following with interest where they take us. If we allow our gaze to wander unrestrained over these images now as we view them, perhaps we too can begin to engage with them with a similar sort of personal intensity as Bushara did in their creation.

Alex Rotas
Bath Spa University College, UK

March 2005