When you enter Taqwa Ali’s studio in the town of Beilen, in what used to be a school, your eye is immediately drawn to the paintings piled against the wall. They are huge canvases with nuances of deep blue, purple undertones, small touches of red, and even a yellowish brown. What looks like a black hole stares at you from the center of some of them.

The works are part of the Blue Nile at Midnight collection, which has just won arts, cognition and criticism student Taqwa the Royal Award for Modern Painting, a prize given by the King of the Netherlands to up-and-coming young artists in the country.

Crimson

‘They’re all made with hibiscus’, Taqwa says, as she takes out a sack of at least five kilos of dried hibiscus flowers to brew tea with. On the black tarpaulin stuck to the floor – the painting area, she calls it – between half-done canvases, there’s a makeshift station with small bowls full of pigment.

Working with just one colour makes me feel like I’m blind

‘I steep the flowers and let them dry in a basket. Then I grind them by hand, sift them, and mix them with an emulsion oil’, she explains. That’s how she creates her own paint. ‘It’s closest to working with watercolours. Except that with hibiscus, you’re painting with a single colour as long as it’s wet.’

It’s all the same intense crimson red, characteristic of the plant. It’s the level of fermentation of the hibiscus, the dilution of the pigment, or even the surface it’s applied on that results in different shades, though that’s not visible until the artwork dries up.

‘Working with just one colour makes me feel like I’m blind’, she says, laughing. ‘I have to wait a few days, and then I need to remember what I did previously so I can do it differently. There’s a lot of experimentation.’ 

Sudan

But the unpredictability and the change is what she loves most about the process, as well as how close it keeps her to her home in Sudan, which she fled fourteen years ago. ‘It is such a big part of our culture. Wherever you go, you’ll be served tea from homegrown hibiscus.’

It all started with the last batch of hibiscus grown in the backyard of their home in Sudan that her mother sent to her in the Netherlands. ‘I was drinking tea while painting, and an intrusive thought came to me: what if I just pour it onto the canvas?’ she says, sipping from a Sudanese hand-painted clay cup. ‘I was weirded out when it turned blue.’ She rolls out the canvas, which has a speck of watery blue as if someone spilled their tea on it.

That impulsive action gave birth to the idea of the Blue Nile at Midnight paintings, a collection of abstract artworks featuring the Nile river, near whichTaqwa grew up.

Love-hate relationship

As a child, she was terrified of the river. She dreaded having to cross the dam with her family to get to the other side of the Nile, a twenty-minutes car ride. ‘The river was so loud and aggressive, yet also sublime; I had a love-hate relationship with it.’ 

Maybe I’m idealizing water on a canvas

It was also an intrinsic part of being ‘home’, which is why she ended up painting it. ‘It’s the location, the memories. But also my own fear of it. I’m trying to preserve a feeling that’s abstract in my mind, too. Maybe I’m idealising water on a canvas.’ 

She looks at satellite images of the river and tries to mimic them. ‘It’s my own sort of translation. Because we never see an image the way it is in reality.’

With small hand gestures, she guides the hibiscus brew onto the canvas to capture the movement of the water. And the black holes? That’s the depth of the river. ‘It’s the idea of sinking into something that you don’t understand’, she explains.

Nature

Taqwa doesn’t just use hibiscus for her art, though. There’s clay for sculptures, or Arabic gum for a rough texture on the canvas. She even uses soil in paintings sometimes. ‘The material always comes before the idea. It dictates the way I move, I don’t try to control it. It and I collaborate to come up with the idea.’

But there’s always a connection with nature and life back in Sudan. ‘I try to stay close to the way I grew up’, she says. And it’s in nature that Taqwa discovered her passion for art in the first place. Growing up, she’d dig up clay with her friends and build small villages in their backyards. 

‘I just never gave up on that, because I was obsessed with how it made me feel.’ It was a form of escapism, she says. ‘As if I was entering my own world.’ There wasn’t a lot of space for individualism in the big family she grew up in. ‘But doodling, colouring, building, that was my own time. Nobody interfered with it.’

Yet it’s that sense of community, the lack of individualism that she misses most about Sudan. ‘I was suffocated by it then, I couldn’t think my own thoughts’, she recalls. ‘Now I really miss somebody thinking for me. I wish my mom would tell me how to do something, how to go about my decisions.’ She bursts out laughing. ‘I must sound like a dick.’

Change

Taqwa hasn’t been back to Sudan since 2011, when violence reached her region and her family fled, first to Ethiopia and then to South Sudan, where they ended up in a refugee camp. ‘We left so suddenly that we had no documents. Officially, we were stateless.’ 

That’s where she met a United Nations worker who changed her life completely. Noticing her high academic performance, she convinced Taqwa to apply for a scholarship to the United World College. The woman called the director and pitched the girl’s story, and before Taqwa knew it, she was living in Maastricht, which is home to one of the eighteen World Colleges. That was eleven years ago.

I got this opportunity to live, instead of die in the war

‘A blessing came out of a curse’, she says. ‘Everything I knew was completely gone overnight. But suddenly, after experiencing so much terror, I got this opportunity to live, instead of die in the war.’ 

It was yet another massive change though, and Taqwa, who was barely sixteen, struggled with that. ‘We talk about evolution in nature like it’s always a good thing. We idealise it. But when evolution happens in a living body, it’s quite difficult’, she says. ‘Maybe sometimes I don’t want to change, maybe I want to keep being the person my mum recognises.’ 

At first, she kept telling herself she’d go back home, so she had to stay the same. A year or two later, she let go of that idea and started inhabiting what she calls the ‘third dimension of a Sudanese in the diaspora’. 

No form

And now? ‘I’m very lost. Confused. Indecisive’, she says. ‘I don’t have as fixed an identity as I used to. It may sound negative, but I quite enjoy it. There’s a limitless nature to it. I’m open to exploring because I have no form.’ 

That’s why her art has no concrete form either. ‘It’s always about movement. I’m embracing change, but also interrogating it.’ There’s one looming question that keeps guiding her, both in art and in life: How do we become? She can’t answer that question herself, not yet at least. She smiles: ‘I’m in a perpetual state of confusion.’

You can find Taqwa Ali’s winning artworks exhibited at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam until 30 March.

Dutch