{"product_id":"ibrahim-el-salahi-prison-notebook","title":"Ibrahim El-Salahi: Prison Notebook","description":"Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudanese, born 1930) is an artist, writer, critic, cultural diplomat  and Sudanese TV star, and one of the most important figures of African and Arabic  modernism. He pioneered an artistic language that engaged Western formal traditions  in dialogue with Sudanese decorative elements and Arabic calligraphy that he has  practised since childhood. The resulting body of work brought him international  acclaim, and he became a major voice of the pan-African avant-garde in the 1960s,  representing Sudan both in domestic government and on the world stage. While  serving as Sudan's Undersecretary of Culture in 1975, El-Salahi was imprisoned without  trial and endured six months of deprivation in the notorious Cooper (now Kober) Prison.  During a period of house arrest that followed, he exorcised his experience in the  Prison  Notebook , arguably the landmark work in the artist's oeuvre. This intensely personal  work is both a major historical document and a masterpiece of drawing containing  pages filled with delicate pen-and-ink drawings of cramped and shackled figures, faces  behind barred doors, self-portraits, prison architecture, birds  and mythological figures that suggest the hope of freedom or escape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e       This bilingual English-Arabic volume comprises a facsimile of the  Prison Notebook (recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art); an English translation of the prose  that appears in the diary; a contextualizing essay by art historian Salah Hassan that  addresses both the work's significance and the social and political moment in which  it was produced; and contemporary commentary by the artist (transcribed from a  recent extant interview) about his images and verse.","brand":"The Museum of Modern Art","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42664972320804,"sku":"9781633450554","price":54.99,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0725\/9734\/0196\/files\/9781633450554.jpg?v=1773239110","url":"https:\/\/thamesandhudson.com.au\/products\/ibrahim-el-salahi-prison-notebook","provider":"Thames \u0026 Hudson Australia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}