File Note 144: Mohammed Sami

SM: I know you’re interested in literary devices that imply a certain doubling or fracturing, a kind of opening-up of something into its other. For instance, you once said something about resembling and its resemblance. This relationship seems to be at play in your painting. It reminds me of discussions around abstraction in painting or, more generally, opacity in artistic practices. Can you talk about the allusive aspect of Arabic literature and how those literary devices relate to your practice?

MS: As an artist, when you’re a first-hand witness of extreme events, you need a strategy to slow down the stereotypical image of trauma and conflict in your work. Otherwise, you may end up being a reporter or mimicking the collective memory – not to mention how some depictions might pass on a mild version of the trauma to society. The subject matter of trauma comes from the Middle East; it often carries accusations and outrage. Therefore, I apply allusive linguistic strategies from Arab literature – puns, euphemisms and metonyms – to imbue the narrative of my paintings with a double meaning. This allows viewers to reach their own conclusions when they look at my work and gives me the freedom not to choose one side of the coin.

SM: What’s the Arabic term for this kind of pun?

MS: Tawriya refers to a standard rhetorical device that involves playing upon words that are similar in form but different in meaning. Tawriya comes from the Arabic finite verb warra: hiding something by showing something else. It defines an expression with double implications: close and distant in such a way that it shows the near and hides the far. It occurs when the speaker emphasises one of the meanings a word may have and neglects the other. It’s also worth mentioning that translating Arab poetry is like making fire with no heat, because the meaning usually loses its structure.

SM: Can you give an example?

MS: I read literature and poetry more than I visit exhibitions, and I have a passion for the Palestinian national poet and author Mahmoud Darwish. Darwish’s poems rarely refer directly to Palestinian crises or conflicts: he uses puns, metaphoric language and allegory to hide the genuine meaning of his poems. In As if I Were Joyful 1 there’s a dialogue between the author’s two selves as the struggle of a person who’s lost his home and wrestled in exile in the West. There are no apparent signifiers that might guide the reader in discerning which home Darwish is referring to, as this might be too specific for the general reader’s sympathies. Therefore, many allusions to objectivity have been used to evade the ‘truth’, providing detail that’s at once specific and vague, such as the features that populate domestic spaces – corridors, mirrors, door buzzers and tiles. The methods of articulating loss and conflict in Arab literature have informed the narratives in my paintings. I try to give them a specific capacity to depict what isn’t there. My attention has moved from direct images of trauma to everyday objects, shadows and the banal as the lowest category in the history of painting, to substitute the extraordinary with the ordinary.

SM: In your work, we barely ever see people. We see landscapes, still lifes and interiors, and yet the figure is absent. We ask, where is the subject, and how is it formed? Who does it respond to? I think, in your painting, you address the subject through his/her absence.

MS: When I talk about ‘human depiction’, I must address the limits of narrative in contemporary painting. Since the invention of the digital camera and video, the scale of narrative in contemporary painting has shrunk. I think there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the immediacy of the image brought about by our reliance on these technologies and the lack of subtlety that exists within them. The second is that the human figure may expose the painting’s secrets and turn it into a didactic illustration or poster. I believe painting is timeless; it’s nearness and alienation and works both with and against time. Painting is like drinking all the sea in order to define a cup of water. I understand that this might make it sound complicated or as if I am trying to achieve the impossible, attempting to marry irreconcilable positions, but to put it in other words, the act of painting is the act of seeking more for less. There must be respect for these standards and limitations in painting. Thus, the absence of the figure, for me, is a gesture of respect and restraint with regard to what the act of painting is allowed to adopt.

SM: Your work pictures fleeting images that are about to disappear, as if you’ve captured them just before they fade away. We talked about your relationship with memory, but maybe it’s also about your relationship with time?

MS: It’s both. These are very important questions because they’re at the core of the process of memory. Again, it connects us to the term ‘belated response’, in the sense that you don’t respond immediately to the image: ‘I’ve got it, and now I have to paint it.’ The thing is, there’s an attempt to reach for something and it fails. Then you try again and you fail again. That’s why these series are born every year – the refugee camps, the execution rooms – because the person behind these paintings is trying to reach something, and he fails, perhaps because the belated response might be deceiving him. It can disappear and then return the next year, as a continuation of the same subject matter, the same depiction, but instead, the focus shifts to the carpet, or to the table, because you remember that the reflection of the table caused you pain, so then you turn your attention to the table. This is the strange thing with memory: you just sit down and things come creeping up to you. It’s very important not to assume this is voluntary. I’m interested in ‘sense memory’, as Jill Bennett, the Australian author, defines it – when you’re unable to remember something, or when you forget, and things happen. Let’s change it from remembering to forgetting. All of these paintings are about what I forget. When the forgetfulness, or the oblivion, is harassed by remembering, this is what happens.

SM: Do you work in series, or do you work on one painting at a time?

MS: Most of my artworks are part of a series; it’s like a process of organic growth; it’s part of this dance and the need to let go. However, I always have to go through this process with vigilance, to avoid imposing the force of unnecessary detail, not exploiting the recollection of ‘nothingness’ (nothingness in contemporary painting is the power that defines our situation, I believe). In this way, over the years, I allow belated memories to extend like an oil stain, stretching across this series of paintings.

SM: Maybe we can connect this to embracing misunderstanding: to using a painting not to generate an understanding of something, but rather to misunderstand better. Maybe it relates to the notion of Tawriya and a move away from constant transparency and the immediacy of the image?

MS: That’s correct. I think that’s why I try to embrace the signifiers we discussed. Tawriya enriches the narrative of the painting with double meaning or duality in its reading. I find it essential to move beyond superficial representations, away from the immediacy of the image or the impact of illustration. By doing that, I’m not encouraged to leave the canvas plane in order to reach the transparency of nothingness. I’ve mentioned the element ‘nothingness’ in our discussion so let me define this more clearly: nothingness is when the waitress notices that your coffee is empty and offers to fill it one more time, but you simply refuse because you believe the sun fills the other half of the cup. You keep gazing at the content of nothingness in search of meaning. This is how the transparency of nothingness reproduces its power in contemporary painting.

An earlier version of this conversation appeared in the exhibition catalogue Is it morning for you yet?, the 58th Carnegie International, ed. Sohrab Mohebbi (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2022).