This painting combines Ishag’s ethnographic study of Zār, a women’s spirit possession cult in central Sudan, and her search for greater luminosity in depicting altered consciousness, something that had interested her since the 1970s. Painted in the artist’s favored earthy colors, the work portrays women with contorted facial expressions and twisted bodies encircling and blending into a transparent square in the center of the composition. It suggests the trances of women possessed by the zār spirit during ritual ceremonies in Ishag’s hometown of Omdurman. “These physical distortions come from inside—from life, from circumstances,” the artist has remarked. “They are mental or psychological.”
2021
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