Visibility and Invisibility in Contemporary Painting - Camden Art Centre

With Martin Clark, Darian Leader, Ralph Rugoff and Mohammed Sami.

Building upon themes and visual quotations from Sami’s exhibition, The Point 0, this panel discussion examined contemporary painting and its capacity to exist as repositories of information, invoking subjective interpretations of private and public experiences through various material and technical processes

The Speakers

The Speakers

Martin Clark is Director of Camden Art Centre and curator of Mohammed Sami: The Point 0. Previously Director of Bergen Kunsthall, Artistic Director of Tate St Ives and Curator at Arnolfoni, Bristol, over the last 20 years Clark has organised more than 80 exhibitions with British and international artists, as well as group shows including: The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree (2020), Up, Down,Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm (2016), The Noing Uv It (2015), The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art (2009) and Pale Carnage (2007). He writes widely on contemporary art and artists, and sat on the Turner Prize Jury in 2023.

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and a founder for the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London. He is the author of, among others, Why do women write more letters than they post?, Promises lovers make when it gets late, Frued’s Footnotes, Stealing the Mona Lisa, Why Do People Get Ill? and The New Black.

Ralph Rugoff OBE is an American-born curator, the director of London’s Hayward Gallery since 2006, and the curator of the Venice Biennale in 2019.

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.