AFRICAN ART : The ARAK Collection

AFRICAN ART: THE ARAK COLLECTION 

The definitive publication of the Qatar-based ARAK Collection

by Ashraf Jamal

Article by PETRA MASON July 22, 2025

The independent Qatar-based ARAK Collection holds over 4,000 works of contemporary African art. Founder and director AbdulRahman AlKhelaifi aka ARAK discovered his passion for African art while travelling from Tanzania to South Africa via the luxury train line, Rovos Rail. The ARAK Collection fosters dialogue around art practices with a focus on African art through exhibitions, publications, research and educational programmes.

Created by art historians, writers, editors and curators living and working on the continent of Africa AFRICAN ART : The ARAK Collection features artworks from 100 + artists including essays and artists biographes, providing an essential resource.

JAMAL & MASON in conversation at the Nirox Foundation 

What sort of thinker is Ashraf Jamal?

While culturally shaped by a Western Euro-American matrix, by virtue of a British public school and North American tertiary education, I am also informed by my hybrid biology - Gujarati, Basuto, Scottish. Two oceans and a continent define me. After the bomb disposal expert in Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, I am an 'international bastard.' 

Describe the African Art zeitgeist

This historical moment is in the thrall of tyranny which refuses all nuance. And yet, we must hold fast to the a-categorical, to ethical freedom. 'Contemporary African Art' is the governing taste for the guilt-stricken, opportunistic, or genuinely progressive. It is a dubious commodification of a complex region. Unsurprising given that during the recent global plague, if you weren't honing your petty fascistic tendencies, you were searching your conscience - diversity and revisionism was the upshot. Black portraiture became a thing. But it seems that the bubble has burst and only the great portraitists, like Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Amoako Boafo, Zanele Muholi, will continue to thrive. Abstraction - the anti-categorical - is the current saving grace. Against dogma, consensus, we long for our solitary instincts. 

What do you consider today's curatorial questions?

Curation matters when liberated from dogma. It is the interstitial, provisional, open-ended we crave. We yearn for courage without witnesses. Statement Art may still have a purpose, but statements placed under erasure - visibly apparent but questionable - are more appealing. We are done with irony, sick to death of absolutism, resigned to stoicism, in love with sophistry. 

What do you consider South Africa's most successful Art Hubs?

The finest art hubs in South Africa are the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) and Nirox. Both operate at a global standard, both are immune to populism. Neither is a fun-house, a drive-thru for a quick-fix. Both understand the critical importance of art that is imminently vital and not representational. A future art hub/museum in Joburg must understand that nationalism-provincialism is banal, that geographies fold into each other, that art surpasses all the names we affix to it. 

Describe African Abstraction

It predates flatness in European art (Manet), crucifies realism, predates cubism. The greatest 20th century artwork - Les demoiselles d'Avignon - is African, though for well nigh a century there has been a concerted effort to suppress this fact. Steve Bantu Biko declared that Africa would give the world a more 'human face.' While we are witnessing a global civilisational death, Africa, always resourceful, finds the way to life. No continent retools waste more brilliantly, no other better understands the magic inside of contaminated excess. If Africa is the beginning and end of humankind, it is also its ethically innovative core.

AFRICAN ART :  The ARAK Collection

Ashraf Jamal

Preface by Salwa Ahmad Almesned, MSc.

Artist and artwork selection by Nneoma Angela Okorie

Foreword and Editor : David Mann

Skira

Printed and bound in Italy

320 Pages

9.7 x 1.1 x 13 inches

ISBN 978-88-572-5348-0