Hussein Shariffe

Hussein Shariffe (7 July 1934 – 21 January 2005, Omdurman, Sudan) was a Sudanese filmmaker, painter, poet and university lecturer at the University of Khartoum. After years of schooling in Khartoum and in Alexandria, Egypt, he studied modern history and fine arts in England, where he had his first exhibition in London's Gallery One in 1957. Back in Sudan in the 1970s, he worked both at the Ministry of Culture and at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Khartoum. In 1973 he began a second artistic career as filmmaker, producing several documentary films and cinematographic essays on subjects such as traditional rites or history in Sudan, as well as on life in exile during his later years in Cairo.

Biography and artistic career Hussein Shariffe was the son of a medical doctor and his wife, both from families related to Muhammed Ahmed El-Mahdi (1844–1885), the religious and political founder of the Mahdist State. He spent his first years in a small village, where he was instructed in reading and writing Arabic and the Quran. After this, he received his primary education at the secular Ahfad School for boys in Rufu'a, a village on the banks of the Blue Nile, south of Khartoum, that had been founded by the pioneer in Sudanese education Babiker Bedri. After an introduction to fine arts, literature and music at the Catholic Comboni School in Khartoum, he continued his schooling at Victoria College, an elite school in Alexandria, Egypt.

Painter In the late 1950s, Shariffe studied Modern History at the University of Cambridge in England, and in 1959, he took a Master's degree at London’s Slade School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Lucian Freud. He won the John Moores Prize for young artists and had his first show in 1957 at London’s Gallery One. The National Portrait Gallery in London holds photographs of Shariffe from this period, sitting in front of his paintings. In his lifetime, he is said to have painted more than 500 paintings, but only few of them have been documented. In 2000, he started work on his last film 'Of dust and rubies', a cinematic rendering of contemporary Sudanese poetry about the experience of exile.

In 2010, his paintings were exhibited at the Salwa Zeidan Gallery, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and in 2017, at the me Collector's room of the Olbricht Foundation in Berlin, Germany. The retrospective exhibition 'The Khartoum School – The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan (1945-present)', presented by the Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates, in 2016, showed his paintings alongside other Sudanese artists of this period. - Some of his paintings have also been presented by auction houses like Christie's or Sotheby's. On the latter's online page dedicated to Sudanese painters, his abstract painting Songlines for Bruce Chatwin is presented as a tribute to Shariffe's friend, Bruce Chatwin, the English travel writer and novelist, who visited Sudan in 1965.

In 2019, the members of a workshop on his last film project Of dust and rubies at the Berlin-based presented their findings at the Berlin International Film Festival 'Forum Expanded', and Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El Said created a film essay about this project.

Filmography

The Throwing of Fire, 1973 The Dislocation of Amber, 1975 Tigers are Better Looking, 1979 Not the Waters of the Moon, 1985 Diary in Exile, 1993 Letters from Abroad, 1997, (not completed) Al-Wathiq (not completed) Dawood (not completed) Of Dust and Rubies, 2000–2005, (not completed)