Return to Print . Mohammad Omer Khalil . Sudanese artists talks of his journeys .

Author Sumesh Sharma

Mohammad Omar Khalil speaks about his journey from Sudan to a practice in printmaking in New York . This was talk was an event for the exhibition Seed for History and Form - Tebhaga curated by Sumesh Sharma at Aicon Gallery , New York . February - March 2017 . The talk is called return to print.

Return to Print

Return to Print is a discussion that looks at Pedagogy and diaspora

through printmaking , how workshops create diasporas. What is the

guild and how did that create connections between India and Africa

through New York. Particularly through the workshops of Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn. Sumesh Sharma of the Clark House Initiative Bombay and Mohammed Omer Khalil the renowned American Sudanese printmaker will lead the panel.

Mohammed Omer Khalil is a printmaker who was born in Burri, Khartoum,Sudan in 1936. He studied at the Khartoum Technical institute which later became the College of Fine arts, and then got a

scholarship to go to England but he decided to go to Florence instead

1963 - 66 . In Sudan he was taught by a Greek teacher by the name of Aristomenis Angelopoulos , who spoke Arabic as he had lived in

Alexandria. The Khartoum school was a western classical academy based on a British curriculum. Rodolfo Margheri was his tutor who

introduced him to printmaking at the Accademia di Belle Arti di

Firenze and it is where Khalil met his wife and moved to America in

1967 after the 6 day Arab-Israel War. He has lived in in New York

since then and was instrumental in the setting up of the Asilah Print

Workshop with Robert Blackburn with whom he has been an associate along with Krishna Reddy.

Sumesh Sharma co-founded the Clark House Initiative, Bombay in 2010 where he is presently the curator as well as being the invited curatorto the biennale of African contemporary art - Dak'Art 2016, Senegal.His practice deals with alternate histories that are informed by the Black Arts movement, Socio-Economics, Immigration in the Francophoneand Vernacular Equalities of Modernism.