Mohammed Sami, Camden Art Centre, London, UK

A personal reflection on Mohammed Sami's exhibition, The Point 0

Mohammed Sami, Refugee Camp, 2022

Having attended the opening last Thursday, I needed to spend time digesting the haunting and mysterious paintings by Mohammed Sami whose exhibition is currently on display at Camden Arts Centre, London. These works truly stayed with me long after I left the exhibition.

The mysterious subjects of the works are like ghostly stage sets that the viewer becomes a part of. Devoid of human physical presence they create a loneliness that I was forced to encounter and confront. The emptiness of the scenes resonated loudly with me and evoked a great sense of discomfort.

Mohammed Sami, Sandstorm, 2022

The artist explains his work in terms of an exploration of memory, but for me the foreboding shadows in many of the works, the darkness, the exclusion from the light, reminded me of a fearful dream, being trapped in a nightmare that I would desperately try to wake from. An ominous sense of fear lingers in the deepest corners of the works and the images have haunted me ever since. My mind keeps returning to those ghostly scenes, and the mystery and ambiguity of the subjects keeps me puzzling over what each might mean.

Mohammed Sami, Electric Issues, 2022

I chose not to read the interpretation or the wall labels during my visit and for this I am grateful. Reviewing the works now I am writing about them, I have discovered that most possess descriptive titles, removing a little of the mystery and steering the viewer towards meaning.

Mohammed Sami, The Weeping Line, 2022

One of my favourite works, The Weeping Line, 2022 aroused immense sadness in me. The composition reminded me of high washing lines full of colourful clothes strung between the peeling walls of ochre buildings in the sunshine of Venice. The scenes that you see all the tourists stopping to take photographs of. But this work, with its ambiguous light source, the dark clothes, the shadows, creates a great sense of loss. Colourful clothes blowing in the breeze have a life about them, but to me these clothes seem redundant. The absence of people is felt most acutely in this work and vividly bought back a memory of my own, when I saw my grandmother’s coat hanging in its usual place in her house, on the back of a dining room chair, shortly after she had died in hospital. The sense of loss and longing this work evoked in me was very real, and discovering the title is now poignant. Sami is working with his own memories, but for me, his work had the power to awaken my own painful past.                                                    

Photographs of the works definitely do not do the paintings justice. In person, the sheer size of the majority of the works is incredibly impactful and Sami’s painterly technique is masterful in its photographic quality but with a blurring and fogginess that implies mystery and alludes to memory.

Mohammed Sami, One Thousand and One Nights, 2022

One of the most striking works in the exhibition is One Thousand and One Nights, 2022. A vast night-time sky stretches over a shadowed landscape below. A wash of vivid blue and green illuminates the evening in an eerie glow, and the sky is punctuated with what first appeared to me to look like a constellation of bright, shining stars. As my eye wandered from the illuminated cloudy sky, I noticed the same explosion of bright, white light in the upper left of the landscape, and at this point I realised that fear may still be lurking in the deepest corners of this work too. An explosion. Are the fiery lights in the sky really missiles? Is this painting not a scene of innocent beauty, but one of terror and destruction?

Mohammed Sami, The Point 0, 2020

The title of the exhibition is taken from one of the smallest works in size, The Point 0. This work is deliberately ambiguous but to me it was easily recognisable as the view from the window of a plane. I imagined a golden sunset washing over a calm sea, which extends to the horizon. Exclusion from the light is again created by the dark shadowed outline of the aeroplane porthole, but in this work, I felt a sense of hope, as if I were travelling towards a joyful destination, as if exclusion would not last for long, but just for the duration of this journey. For the Iraq-born artist this work represents a dusty landscape of sand, something stifling and claustrophobic. Every work proposes multiple possibilities. This felt to me like a clever work to begin the exhibition with - a point to begin with, an origin, an infinite loop, a point to return to. The point 0.

   

Mohammed Sami, The Point 0 is on display at Camden Arts Centre, London, UK until 28 May 20222.