“Mohammed Sami does not paint people…Instead, he is an artist of places and things – interiors, cities, clothing, potted plants – and of the traces, both material and psychological, that trauma leaves behind. He is also an artist of memory, allegory and truth.”
At once hauntingly devoid of human presence yet offering elegiac traces of the past, Mohammed Sami’s The Praying Room depicts a mesmerizing narrative space submerged in the subconscious, marring personal memory to conjure false images. Recalling Sami’s own history as a refugee from his native Iraq, The Praying Room distorts the familiar using multi-textured paint and atmospheric layers, navigating trauma while never directly referencing explicit events. Consistent with other examples from his oeuvre, the composition is universally felt, absorbings the viewer in an uncanny yet alluring room fraught with ambiguity. Test.mes nt to the poignancy and evocative power of his work, Sami’s paintings are housed in such prestigious permanent collects ions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Pinault collects ion, Paris; amongst others. Recently exhibited in a widely acclaimed solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre, London, The Praying Room unites the known and the unknown, a testimony to lived experience and to how it reprises and reshapes itself in the theater of memory.
Born in Baghdad in 1984 under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Sami lived through the Iran-Iraq conflict, two Gulf wars, the US-led invasion, and sectarian violence. As a child, he was enlisted by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime to produce propaganda murals and portraits of the dictator, developing a talent for large-scale painting despite a distaste for the subject matter. In 2007, Sami was granted asylum in Sweden and spent seven months in a refugee camp before studying at Belfast School of Art and earning an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018. The tumultuous experiences of Sami’s early life are the source inspiration for his gripping oeuvre, one which deploys painting to obliquely articulate notions of war, memory, and loss.
The Praying Room is defined by bold, ominous shadows, its richly textured floors mimicking the patterns of ornate, pile-woven Islamic carpets that surround it. The viewer is presented with a partially obstructed image of a Muslim man in prayer, hands open and outstretched with his turban only just distinguishable from the background. Dangling keys hang from a door that opens to an unending hallway, and a drooping plant casts a silhouette more arachnid than house plant. The space radiates with ominous energy, triggering memory and essentializing past experiences. Reflecting on the present work, Sami notes, “It could really be that there is some image of a religious figure praying, that there is a room like this, and that the shadow is just a shadow of a plant. We get a sensation of threat, and yet, it’s very important not to identify where that lies. It seems real: an incident that has occurred in this particular interior. In this case, I try to turn the familiarity against itself.” (Mohammed Sami quoted in Hettie Judah, “Mohammed Sami: ‘We can‘t move forward without the power of the past‘,” Art Fund, 14 February 2023, (online))
Sami never takes photographs or makes sketches, instead mining his own experiences from his formative years in Iraq and Sweden and working on several paintings at once. Working directly onto canvas with brushes, pallet knives and spray paint, Sami gives as much attention to the textures, surfaces, and details in the works as he does to the composition as a whole. Titles and motifs recur, giving the impression that his paintings are engaged in a never-ending conversation. They share the dreamlike qualities of Peter Doig’s landscapes and infiltrate the mind like Adrian Ghenie’s paintings which unearth legacies of trauma. Sami notes, “The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger.” (The artist quoted in: Elizabeth Fullerton, “I hide the traumatic image behind a cactus or carpet’ – the paintings of Iraqi exile Mohammed Sami,” The Guardian, 21 March 2022, (online)) In many ways akin to the Surrealist painters of the 1920s, such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, Sami reconfigures the ordinary into the unexpected; and yet he establishes a path of his own with a seemingly reductive style, including only key elements so the viewer is exposed to a small part of the narrative in similarly claustrophobic spaces.
“Sami does not simply reflect on his difficult past or glorify his newfound freedom. He plays with pictorial convention, subverting the viewer’s expectation of pleasing claritys and depth to articulate the ambivalence of the refugee experience: escape and loss, liberation and destruction are intertwined.”
Sami’s profound skill in negotiating the past through painting is remarkably evident in The Praying Room. His use of blurred and warped objects illustrate the vulnerabilities of t.mes and the slippage of memory, especially as it relates to trauma. Remnants of human intervention linger and their absence is notable, making the space all the more chilling. With rich mark-making and unusual spatial configurations, The Praying Room evokes the harrowing sense of loss and conflict that permeates war-torn countries.