Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I
- Artist: Ibrahim El-Salahi
- Date: 1961–5
- Medium: Enamel paint and oil paint on cotton
- Dimensions: support: 2588 x 2600 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is “Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I” by Ibrahim El‑Salahi. Painted between 1961 and 1965 with enamel and oil on cotton, it sits on a large square canvas—about 2.5 m on each side—so you can almost feel the depth of the yellow ground. In it, ghostly figures rise with stretched heads and hollow eyes, their limbs folding into arabesques, crescents topping the heads. The white over‑painting blurs line and shape, giving the work an almost dream‑like quality that matches its title. El‑Salahi drew on the quiet, somber palette of Sudan’s landscape—black, white, grey, ochre—and blended it with the rhythm of Arabic calligraphy and African masks. When he returned to a newly independent Sudan in the middle of a civil war, he felt the need for a new visual language. Here, memory and childhood dreams collide, turning sound into line and calligraphy into form. The piece was finished first in Sudan and later in New York, then rolled back to Khartoum, where it remained hidden for decades before resurfacing in a 2000 exhibition.
See it in person
Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
