Name: The Point 0
Start: 2023-01-27
End: 2023-05-28
Location: Camden Art Centre

Type

Exhibitions

Format

In the Building

Date 27 Jan/28 May 2023

Price Free entry

Collaborators

The Point 0 was organised by Camden Art Centre in collaboration with De La Warr Pavilion where it was also exhibited between 10 June and 3 September 2023.

Supporters

We are grateful to all those who generously supported this important exhibition: especially Lead Donors AMA Collection and Sacha Janke and Andrew McCormack; and to the members of our Mohammed Sami Exhibition Circle – Per Anders Ovin, Alexander V. Petalas, Sam Schwartz, Karen Smith, Matt Symonds, and the Elie Khouri Art Foundation; to Angie Koulakoglou who supported our File Note publication; to The Embassy of Sweden in London; and to all those who wish to remain anonymous. With special thanks to our transport partner TFA London; Stuart Shave / Modern Art; and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Mohammed Sami’s (b.1984, Baghdad, Iraq) first institutional solo show in the UK continued his long-standing exploration of memory in relation to time and conflict.

Drawing on his own experiences living under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, and subsequently as a refugee in Sweden, his large-scale paintings exquisitely render abandoned interiors, claustrophobic cityscapes and uncanny depictions of apparently everyday objects including clothing, mattresses, chairs and tables. There is a haunting absence of people in these depictions of space and place, whose power lies as much in what cannot be seen or hovers just beyond the frame.

Presented across Camden Art Centre’s Galleries 1 and 2, this exhibition included a series of major new paintings and was accompanied by the first dedicated monograph on Sami, designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio with essays by Darian Leader and Amy Sherlock.

Images Virtual Tour Artist Film The Artist Supported by

Installation view of Mohammed Sami's exhibition 'The Point 0' at Camden Art Centre, 2023. Photo: Rob Harris

Virtual Tour

Mohammed Sami on 'The Point 0', at Camden Art Centre, 2023. This film was produced by Jared Schiller for Camden Art Centre, 2023.

Panel Discussion: Visibility and Invisibility in Contemporary Painting

20 April (2023) 7 – 9pm
A panel discussion between the Director of Camden Art Centre 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.

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and a founder for the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London.

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.

The Artist

Born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1984, 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 58^th 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.