Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1984; fearing for his life, in 2007 he fled his homeland, seeking asylum in Sweden before moving to Northern Ireland, where he earned a first-class honours degree from Belfast School of Art, Ulster University in 2015. In 2018 he completed a master’s degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work, which explores belated, traumatic memories triggered by common everyday objects, has been included in group exhibitions in the UK, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2018) and Towner International (2020) and is represented in the Government Art Collection and York Art Gallery collections.
Painter Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1984. Growing up in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq war, his earliest memories are of 'the ink-black darkness created by the MDF boards that covered' the windows of his family home and prevented the house becoming a missile target (Chris Harvey, Mohammed Sami on making art in Baghdad, Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2019). He studied drawing and painting at The Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, Iraq, graduating in 2005. Subsequently, as an employee of the Ministry of Culture, it was Sami's job to recover artworks that had been removed from Saddam Hussein's Centre for Contemporary Art. It was stressful work, causing Sami to suffer a minor stroke at the age of 22. Fearing for his life, in 2007 he fled Iraq with the help of a friend who worked for the French embassy in Baghdad. He sought asylum in Sweden and was granted residency before moving to Northern Ireland where, in 2015, he earned a first-class honours degree from Ulster University, Belfast. In 2018 he completed a master’s degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London, where he began to paint autobiographically, taking inspiration from Dr. Peter A. Levine's book, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past. His paintings explore belated memories triggered by common everyday objects, and articulate war and memory obliquely. He spends a month on each painting, reflecting, 'I move the objects, erase a lot' (Mohammed Sami, Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2019). The semi-abstract register and multi-textured paint create a nuanced relationship between the original event and its recollection. Still-lifes, internal-external spaces and landscapes take on muted and uncanny significance. Freeing his work from the need to imitate reality, in many cases, his paintings appear to be about something other than a source of trauma, challenging typical images of suffering and providing a symptomatic perspective on the impact of conflict.
Sami's subjectmatter ranges from the symbolic to the everyday and the historical. Some of his large scale paintings are reminiscent of the Al Báath murals which decorated the walls of his school in Iraq, while in others the traumatic aftershocks of the Iraq war continue to surface, as subconscious echoes. Sami believes that the medium of painting has the capacity to record the ghosts of things lost. Traces of living as well as the human condition are key themes within his work. In an attempt to resist categorisation his ideas are not expressed explicitly but rendered ambiguous in an effort to allow space for the viewer to arrive at their own conclusions.
Sami lives and works between London and Norrköping, Sweden. In 2019 he was awarded the Hottinger Prize at the Mall Galleries' FBA Futures exhibition for his painting Unedited Still Life (2018), as a result of which the work entered the Hottinger Collection. Born of trauma, Sami describes the work as depicting, 'a table and a wall, where the dimensions are odd, unsettling, with smashed crockery, a pendant spoon and a phone off the hook that leaves an unexpected shadow' (Mohammed Sami, Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2019). His work has been included in group exhibitions in the UK, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 and Towner International, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne in 2020. Mohammed Sami is represented in public collections the UK including the Government Art Collection and York Art Gallery collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Mohammed Sami]
Publications related to [Mohammed Sami] in the Ben Uri Library