Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, let me tell you about Mohammed Sami, an artist who paints the ghosts of the past with a delicacy and violence that will make you tremble to your bones. Born in Baghdad in 1984, he went through the hell of the Gulf Wars before going into exile in Sweden in 2007, then settling in London where he lives and works today. But don’t expect yet another tearful story of an exiled artist. What makes Sami powerful is precisely his ability to transcend the autobiographical narrative to reach a universal dimension that pierces through all of us.
In his monumental canvases, not a single human figure on the horizon. And yet, what presence! The absent have never been more present than in these empty interiors, these deserted urban landscapes, these everyday objects that seem to vibrate with an uncanny strangeness. Take “The Praying Room” (2021), where the shadow of an indoor plant transforms into a threatening spider on the wall. This is where all of Sami’s genius lies: in his ability to make horror emerge from the mundane, to reveal the violence lurking in the most innocuous corners of our daily lives.
This dialectic between presence and absence leads us directly to the concept of “spectrality” developed by Jacques Derrida. For the French philosopher, the specter is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive, but inhabits an intermediate space that destabilizes our categories of thought. Sami’s paintings perfectly embody this Derridean “hauntology”: each painting is haunted by invisible presences, traumas that keep returning, like those official portraits with blackened faces that populate his interiors.
Look carefully at “Meditation Room”: a military portrait hanging on the wall, the face obscured by a thick layer of shiny black paint. This glossy substance makes the silhouette stand out against the matte surface of the canvas, paradoxically reinforcing its material presence. The portrait seems indestructible, while the room around it crumbles. The image survives in a space hostile to any living presence. The architecture seems to break under the weight of ideology; reality dies under the assault of images.
The pictorial matter itself becomes the theater of a struggle between revelation and concealment. The surfaces of his canvases are worked like battlefields, scratched, superimposed, erased then repainted. In “One Thousand and One Nights” (2022), the night sky dotted with explosions could almost pass for fireworks if it weren’t for that toxic green that reminds us of Gulf War images in night vision. Sami constantly plays with this ambiguity, forcing us to look beyond appearances.
This approach leads us to the second fundamental philosophical concept for understanding his work: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. For the French philosopher, our perception of the world is never neutral but always charged with meaning, memory, affect. Sami’s paintings perfectly illustrate this idea: a simple rolled carpet can evoke a wrapped body (“Study of Guts”, 2022), a row of empty chairs becomes a cemetery (“The Parliament Room”, 2022).
Merleau-Pontian phenomenology teaches us that the visible is never separated from the invisible, that all perception is woven with significant absences. This is exactly what Sami does in his paintings: he makes the invisible visible, he gives form to absence. In “Weeping Walls III” (2022), the pale trace left on the wallpaper by a disappeared frame becomes a poignant metaphor for memory itself. This rectangle lighter than the rest of the wall tells the story of an absence, of a void that paradoxically makes visible what is no longer there.
This phenomenological approach also manifests in his treatment of space. Perspectives are often disturbed, planes collide, creating impossible spaces that evoke the distortions of traumatic memory. In “The Point 0”, the painting that gives its title to his exhibition at the Camden Art Centre, the airplane window becomes a window to nothingness, a zero point that is neither a beginning nor an end. The landscape suggested by an ochre gradient reveals itself in all its flatness, betraying the simplicity and solidity of the paint.
In Sami’s chromatic palette, these cadaverous greens, these coagulated blood reds, these ash grays are not chosen at random. They contribute to this atmosphere of diffuse unease that permeates his entire work. Even the apparently most neutral colors are charged with a muted tension, as if they were about to tip into something darker.
Take “The Grinder” (2023), exhibited at Blenheim Palace. At first glance, one might think it’s a banal scene: a round table surrounded by four chairs, seen from above. The carpet has the color of clammy meat – pallid, anemic, speckled with gray and brown. The chairs are golden, their backs adorned with a baroque emblem – seats for people who like to feel important. But the shadow projected in the center could be that of a ceiling fan… or helicopter blades. In the universe of Sami’s symbolic nightmares, these blades could just as well belong to a helicopter or a kitchen mixer.
What’s particularly interesting in his work is his way of playing with scales. In “Refugee Camp” (2021), the illuminated building is relegated to the very top of the canvas, tiny against the immense cliff that occupies three-quarters of the image. This disproportion isn’t just a matter of composition: it visually translates a power relationship, a form of social and political crushing.
The artist also excels in his way of treating light. It’s never a natural, reassuring light, but rather an artificial, unsettling luminosity that seems to emanate from the objects themselves. In “Electric Issues” (2022), the electrical cables cast shadows that look like giant spiders. Light, traditionally associated with revelation, becomes in Sami’s work an instrument of distortion and anxiety.
There is in these works a permanent tension between the desire to tell and the necessity to keep silent, between the will to show and the impossibility of direct representation. This tension is particularly palpable in his interior paintings, where everyday objects seem charged with latent threat. A simple broom leaning against a wall can evoke a rifle barrel, a rolled carpet can suggest a wrapped body.
In his recent exhibition at Blenheim Palace, “After the Storm”, Sami dialogues with the history of the place in a subtle and subversive way. His “Immortality” (2024), a negative portrait of Winston Churchill, is a powerful reflection on how historical figures become projection screens for our own fantasies and ideologies. By blackening Churchill’s face while preserving his immediately recognizable posture, based on Yousuf Karsh’s famous photograph, Sami questions our relationship with historical icons and collective memory.
“Chandelier” (2024), hung in the Red Drawing Room, references war with its trompe l’oeil image of a chandelier that evokes a drone. The particleboard background recalls abandoned buildings, while Sami includes the date March 2003 – the start of the American invasion of Iraq. It’s a subtle but devastating insertion of recent history into this palace dedicated to British military victories.
In “The Statues” (2024), several objects are depicted wrapped in rolls of fabric, raising questions about what lies beneath the material. The title suggests they might be public monuments perhaps removed from their pedestals. But as Sami himself has suggested, they could just as well be bodies lying in the rivers of Mesopotamia. This deliberate ambiguity is characteristic of his approach.
“The Eastern Gate” (2023), a vast panorama exhibited in the Saloon, shows Baghdad bathed in orange light with a mosque silhouetted against the horizon line. The presence of this work in this place charged with British military history creates a fascinating dialogue between different perspectives on conflict and empire.
Critics often tend to reduce Sami’s work to his personal history, to see in it only a response to his experience of war and exile. This does injustice to the complexity and universality of his work. Of course, these experiences inform his work, but they don’t exhaust it. What makes his painting powerful is precisely its ability to transcend the particular to reach the universal.
Sami’s art is deeply political, but not in the usual sense. He doesn’t denounce, doesn’t take positions, doesn’t try to convince us. He does something more subtle and perhaps more effective: he makes us doubt our perceptual certainties, he shakes our categories of thought. In this, his work joins Jacques Rancière’s thinking on the “distribution of the sensible”: the most powerful political art is that which modifies our way of seeing and thinking, rather than that which delivers an explicit message.
Temporality in Sami’s works is complex, stratified. The past is never really past, it continues to inform the present, to haunt it. This conception of time echoes Walter Benjamin’s thinking on history: the catastrophes of the past are not closed events, but continue to act in the present. This is particularly visible in works like “23 Years of Night” (2022), where time seems suspended in a perpetual present.
In this work, particleboard panels block a window, but the tulle curtains are embroidered with delicate stars, tempering the desolation. This detail evokes Sami’s life growing up with windows barricaded against bombs – and yet, even in this forced darkness, beauty finds a way to persist.
What makes Sami’s work so relevant today is that it speaks of collective trauma without falling into the spectacular or sensational. In an era when we are bombarded with images of violence, he chooses to show absence rather than presence, emptiness rather than fullness. This approach resonates particularly with our image-saturated era.
His technique is as remarkable as his conceptual approach. The surfaces of his canvases are worked with exceptional mastery, creating textures that tell their own story. In “Ashfall”, the black and white particles falling on the city buildings create an atmosphere of post-apocalyptic desolation. The pictorial matter itself seems to have been subjected to trauma, as if the paint carried the scars of the story it tells.
Sami’s influences are diverse and profound. One can think of Luc Tuymans, who once advised him to “paint the sound of the bullet, not the bullet itself”. But Sami goes further: in his work, the distinction between the object and its representation becomes unstable. Images, shadows, and reflections appear more powerful than the physical things that precede them.
His use of metonymy and euphemism as pictorial strategies is not just a stylistic choice. These techniques, learned under Saddam Hussein’s regime where truth could only be expressed indirectly, have become powerful tools in his artistic language. The initial constraint has transformed into creative freedom.
In works like “Ten Siblings” (2021), where a stack of mattresses with varied patterns fills the canvas like an abstraction, Sami transforms ordinary objects into powerful metaphors. These superimposed mattresses, with their stripes, quilting, and faded floral patterns, tell a story of collective life, of promiscuity, perhaps of refuge.
The way Sami treats architectural space is also significant. In “Slaughtered Sun”, the burnt orange sky casts an supernatural glow on wheat fields furrowed by deep purple grooves – perhaps tractor tracks, but the blood-red puddles in the foreground suggest latent violence. This transformation of the pastoral landscape into a scene of potential violence is characteristic of his approach.
So yes, we can speak of masterpiece when we see an exhibition like “The Point 0” or “After the Storm”. Not because these works are technically perfect – although they often are – but because they manage to create a new pictorial language to speak of the unspeakable. Sami doesn’t paint violence, he paints its echoes, its reverberations in our most banal daily life.
In a world where contemporary art often loses itself in empty conceptual gesticulations or facade activism, Mohammed Sami’s work reminds us that great painting still has something to tell us. Something essential about our way of inhabiting the world, of living with our ghosts, of facing history.
His latest work at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, “Upside Down World” (2024), perfectly illustrates this ability to transcend the particular to reach the universal. In this urban scene bathed in toxic yellow haze, modernist buildings seem to float in an unsettling in-between. In the foreground, what might pass for wildflowers turns out to be plastic debris caught in the vegetation. It’s an image of our time, where beauty and desolation are inextricably mixed.
In “Emotional Pond” (2023), Sami forces us to look down, towards a small red opening in an otherwise ink-black canvas. What at first appears to be a puddle in the mud turns out to be an inverted reflection of distant architecture. It’s a powerful metaphor for how memory works: sometimes, it’s in the smallest details, the most insignificant ones, that suddenly emerges an entire submerged world.
This is why his work is so important. Not because it tells us a personal story, but because it allows us to see our own world differently. Each painting is an invitation to look beyond appearances, to see the specters that haunt our daily lives. Isn’t this the highest mission of art?
Sami’s relevance for our time only grows. In a world where conflicts multiply, where population displacements reach unprecedented levels, his art offers us a visual language to think about these realities. Not by showing them directly, but by revealing how they persist in the most ordinary objects, the most everyday spaces.
His art reminds us that truth doesn’t always reside in what is shown, but often in what is suggested, in the interstices between the visible and the invisible. It’s an art that teaches us to see differently, to be attentive to the signs, traces, and significant absences that constitute our reality.
