Displacement

Location

Country: Turkey
City: Ankara
Place: British Embassy

Drawing on his experiences living under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, and subsequently as a refugee in Sweden, Mohammed Sami's large-scale paintings exquisitely render abandoned interiors, claustrophobic cityscapes and uncanny depictions of apparently everyday objects. Displacement shows a Swedish plug abandoned on the floor beside a British power socket. There is a haunting absence of people in these depictions of space and place, whose power lies as much in what cannot be seen or hovers just beyond the frame.
Sami explains: 'As an Iraqi artist, people expect to see in my works explicit images of trauma, violence and death. While my paintings do not deal with these subjects directly, they are implicitly there... These autobiographical paintings record a vivid process of remembering. No memories are represented explicitly, but the condition of remembering is present. There is no intention to show evidence, or record loss or death, but there is a burden of remembering.'

Born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1984, Mohammed Sami now lives and works in London. Having completed studies in drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, he worked at the Ministry of Culture, Baghdad, before being granted asylum in Sweden in 2007. Sami graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2015, and earned an MFA at Goldsmiths’ College in 2018. Sami has his first institutional solo show in the UK at Camden Art Centre, London, in 2023 (touring to De La Warr Pavilion). His work has previously featured in numerous group exhibitions, including The London Open 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Mixing It Up: Painting Today at Hayward Gallery, London (2021); Stilla Liv / Still Life, Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Gotland, Sweden (2020); Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Doha, Qatar (2018–19) and The Sea is the Limit, York Art Gallery, UK (2018); as well as The Culture Night of Norrköping City, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden (2011). His paintings are held by a number of major collections, including the Arts Council Collection, London; Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Imperial War Museum, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Tate, London.

Places

Subjects

war art, Iraq War, electricity socket, electrical plug, cable

Materials & Techniques

acrylic (paint), linen, painting (as object name), acrylic painting

Artist

Mohammed Sami (1984 - )

Title

Displacement

Date

2017

Medium

Acrylic on linen

Acquisition

Purchased from Bloomberg New Contemporaries, March 2019

Provenance

New Contemporaries; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 2019

GAC number

18790