The painting was on the floor. To see Fadlabi's The Onset of Vertigo at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2020, visitors had to reckon with an image under their feet rather than on the wall ahead. Acrylic paint lay beneath a thick layer of lacquer that allowed people to walk onto it. Above the staircase nearby was Per Krohg's celebrated ceiling mural, painted in 1932. Fadlabi placed his work in conversation with that older picture of an artist's journey, changing the direction of the viewer's gaze and the institution's account of its own history.
The Sudanese-born painter called his floor work a time machine. It moved among his own memories, the exhibition history of a Norwegian artists' house and a mural made long before he arrived in the country. A visitor stepping across the lacquer entered more than a large image. The act joined two bodies of time: the official record displayed by the institution and a new painting made by an artist whose experience had not been part of that original picture. The floor did not erase the ceiling. It made the distance between them available to feel.
Fadlabi's paintings have long joined Ethiopian church icons, African barbershop murals, pop art and Afrofuturism, according to institutions that have exhibited him. Those terms alone cannot describe what his work does. In Oslo, he made a horizontal surface people could traverse while looking back toward a vertical image of artistic ascent. In northern Sweden, he later painted wind shelters on an ice road, then moved them after the ice melted. The works make time and place into materials. A future is present in how a painting changes the route through a room or how an object shelters people from wind and outlasts a winter.
Looking down while looking up
Per Krohg's An Artist's Thorny Path to the Heights presents a male figure passing through doors that stand for stages of artistic life. The Kunstnernes Hus exhibition account describes a journey through nature, illusion and wisdom that rises toward light but ultimately circles back. The ceiling mural has long been part of the building's identity. Its place overhead can make artistic achievement appear as something a visitor must lift their eyes to receive.
Fadlabi answered with The Onset of Vertigo across the floor. His work did not give the visitor another heroic figure to admire from below. It invited movement over an image that could hold multiple references at once. The institution describes it as a network of stories, deceptions, pain and fulfilment rather than a single upward path. That rhizomic form matters: a network can have many points of entry and can continue growing without granting one route the authority of a final ascent.
The lacquer changed the ordinary boundary between a picture and its viewer. It protected the paint enough for bodies to cross it, but also made those crossings part of the work's life. In a conventional gallery, a painted floor might be cordoned off as a fragile object. Here, the surface asked for the visitor's weight. Looking became a physical relation to the image. The historical dialogue with Krohg took place while people moved between the works and through the building.
Fadlabi's own account in a 2021 interview with Billedkunst resisted the demand that he explain each reference in the painting. He spoke of the distance between his work and Krohg's and of the older artist's inability to imagine a Sudanese painter answering him in the same building decades later. He wanted the painting to stand on its own. That position leaves the image open to viewers without pretending the institutional history around it is neutral.
The anniversary exhibition set a timeline along the walls, while archival footage from Norwegian public broadcasting appeared outside the room containing the painting. The institution placed Fadlabi's work in conversation with its record of major exhibitions without making him another image in the sequence. His painted floor disturbed the direction in which a timeline normally asks people to look.
The scale of the work was crucial. A small canvas beside Krohg's mural could have entered the room as a respectful response. A floor that visitors crossed occupied the building's shared ground. Fadlabi shifted the institution's spatial hierarchy without removing the work that preceded him. He made a passage between images rather than a replacement. The word vertigo captures the effect of a room where high and low, old and new, official history and lived arrival no longer hold their familiar positions.
Painting beyond a fixed origin
Fadlabi grew up around Khartoum and studied art there before coming to Norway, where he also trained at the Oslo art academy. He has spoken about learning from the painted charts of African barbershops: images made for a practical setting, with colours and figures that can carry more than a literal likeness. Ethiopian church painting has been another important source. In the Billedkunst interview, he discussed its images of brown sacred figures and a history not derived from the need to answer European art. The source offers a different route into the painted figure.
These influences meet in the work without losing their particular histories. A barbershop chart belongs to commerce, craft and the daily making of appearance. An icon belongs to devotion and a tradition of repeated forms. Pop art can recast objects and images that already circulate widely. Afrofuturism can ask how Black histories and speculative futures occupy the same field. Fadlabi draws among them to make paintings whose surfaces can be immediate while their references keep unfolding.
In 2013, an Oslo exhibition titled The Prediction Machine brought that mixture into a direct conversation with speculative art. The exhibition notice described new figurative paintings of saints and superheroes, with references to Ethiopian church art, barbershops, Sun Ra's Afrofuturism and retrofuturism. The pairing of saint and superhero is more than a playful comparison. Both figures can carry a community's hopes, though they emerge from very different systems of belief and image-making. A painting can let them occupy the same visual world without resolving them into one identity.
The title The Prediction Machine also leaves a question hanging over the viewer. Who is supposed to predict the future, and through what images? A sacred icon can hold a long continuity of story and ritual. A comic hero often moves in serial adventures toward dangers yet to come. Sun Ra's work imagined Black cosmic presence through music, costume and performance. Fadlabi's paintings were shown in a gallery, but the references refused to stay within a single art-historical category. The machine may be painting itself: a surface that draws already existing images into new relations and makes tomorrow look less preordained.
The curatorial descriptions of Fadlabi's practice use Afrofuturism as one influence among several. That breadth is visible in The Onset of Vertigo, where a literal science-fiction image is unnecessary. Its time machine is a walkable painting. It brings a Sudanese painter into a Norwegian institutional history that once had no place for him. The future arrives through a change in who can answer an old mural and how visitors travel through the room.
The floor work contains Fadlabi's perspective, but it also addresses a building, a mural, earlier exhibitions and a public walking through them. Its reach is larger than an identity label. The invitation to cross the painting gives each visitor a place in that exchange, even as the painted surface keeps its own visual life.
A shelter that changes address
The ice road in Luleå is a seasonal structure. In winter, it gives people a route over frozen water and uses wind shelters to protect them along the way. In the 2023–24 season, Fadlabi painted those shelters with colour, pattern and calligraphy. After the ice melted, the structures were moved to Hertsön, a neighbourhood in the Swedish city, and given another position in public space. The work, Sadaqah Jariyah: On behalf of Nils Amund Raknerud, changed its use as the weather changed.
The Luleå Biennial's account explains that Fadlabi drew on Sudanese traditions of charitable acts performed in memory of the dead. Such acts can benefit the living while honouring someone who is gone. A wind shelter makes the idea tangible: a person who never met the commemorated individual can still receive protection. The painting carries a name and a dedication, but its gift is also the shade or windbreak offered by an object built for public use.
Fadlabi dedicated the work to the late Norwegian writer and mentor Nils Amund Raknerud. The painted text, translated by the Biennial, speaks of love, the mentor's soul and protecting people's bodies from wind. These are direct words for an artwork moving through a harsh season. The shelter's materials, not only its imagery, fulfil them. It stands against cold while remembering a person whose life can continue to matter through care extended to others.
The journey from ice road to Hertsön complicates the idea of a memorial fixed in one place. Once the frozen surface could no longer support the shelters, they did not cease to be art. They entered another neighbourhood and another use. A work made for winter gained an afterlife in spring. The move gave its time an arc, but not a final ending. It could be seen by people who had never travelled the ice road, and its dedication could meet a different public.
The artist's biography crossed Sudan and Norway before this project occupied northern Sweden. Those journeys do not make the work a simple illustration of migration. Its more exact subject is the relation between remembrance and infrastructure. What does a city build for bodies living now, and whose names does it allow that protection to carry? In Fadlabi's shelters, a commemorative practice associated with Sudan becomes a functioning part of a Swedish public landscape. The cultural reference is neither hidden nor offered as exotic decoration. It changes how a piece of civic equipment can be understood.
The Biennial described Fadlabi as living and working in Luleå at the time of the commission. Earlier Oslo sources record a long practice in Norway. The locations are not competing claims to a single permanent home. They mark different moments of a career that has made local institutions and public space answerable to histories beyond their usual frame. The Onset of Vertigo changed a visitor's position inside an artists' house; Sadaqah Jariyah changed a wind shelter's meaning as it moved across seasons.
A future that remembers the dead
In 2024, Fadlabi also showed Dissecting Love and 10 Dead Sudanese Men at Galleri Syster in Luleå. The latter used a pallet, plastic jug, water, cardboard, plastic and net. Its materials are ordinary and exposed, far from the durable finish of a monument. The Biennial's work record places the pieces against the ongoing war in Sudan and the displacement it has caused. It also notes his interest in a spiritual response to conflict. The title 10 Dead Sudanese Men refuses to let the political background remain abstract.
The contrast with the painted shelter is instructive. The shelter offers a usable form of care linked to a named mentor. The gallery installation gives a number and a national description to lives lost in war, alongside materials that can look provisional. One work meets a body in cold wind; the other confronts a viewer with how bodies disappear into the scale of conflict. Both make remembrance a question of what is built and placed before the public.
Fadlabi's art keeps returning to that placement. A saint and superhero enter the same painting. A Sudanese artist makes a floor beneath a Norwegian mural. A dedication travels from an ice road to a neighbourhood. These are changes of relation rather than illustrations of a single future world. The Afrofuturist current recognised by his exhibiting institutions lies in the freedom to bring Black and African histories forward without accepting the positions assigned to them in an existing cultural order.
His time machine is not a device with a dashboard. It is a painted surface that people step on, a shelter that moves when the season turns, an image capable of answering another image across decades. The works do not claim that a different future appears automatically when symbols are rearranged. They ask what must change in a room or a city for another account of life to be inhabitable. Fadlabi puts that question underfoot and out in the wind, where the viewer's own movement becomes part of the answer.