Conversations: Mohammed Sami & Martin Clark - Camden Art Centre

On the occasion of Mohammed Sami's exhibition The Point 0 at Camden Art Centre, Director Martin Clark sat down with Sami to discuss his journey of artistic practice.

Recalling memories from when he was a child and his relationship to art, Sami speaks of how he started painting and continued to develop his practice through various different stages of his career.

The discussion walked through the exhibition as a whole, while also touching on wider conversations developing around the role of painting in contemporary society. As Sami himself points out during the talk, he does not align himself with any specific categories of art or painting. He does not typically paint portraits, or abstract pieces, or landscapes, instead he exists outside of these classifications that painting so often falls into. Clark and Sami go on to discuss the role of painting at present, how the practice is developing and where he as an artist sits within that conversation.

 

The Artist

The Artist

Born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1984, Mohammed Sami lives and works in London, UK. Having completed studies in drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, he worked at the Ministry of Culture in Baghdad, before being granted asylum in Sweden in 2007. Sami graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2015, and earned an MFA at Goldsmith’s College, London, in 2018. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including: the 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, USA (2022–23); The London Open 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2022); Mixing It Up: Painting Today at Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2021); Stilla liv (Still life), Gallery Magnus Karlsson, Gotland, Sweden (2021); The Sea is the Limit, York Art Gallery, UK and Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Doha, Qatar (2018-19); as well as The Culture Night of Norrköping City, Norrköping Art Museum, Sweden (2011). His paintings are held by the Arts Council Collection, London; The Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; The Blenheim Art Foundation, Woodstock; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Government Art Collection, London; the HE Museum, Foshan; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Imperial War Museum, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tate, London; and the Permanent Collection of York Art Gallery, York.