Past Exhibitions
Can't We Just Get Along? group exhibition at Gallery Stevenson, 2024, Amsterdam
On 22 November, a political party that compares the Quran to Mein Kampf, and would like to ban the construction of mosques, won the Dutch elections. They propose to strip people with dual citizenship of their Dutch nationality if convicted of a crime, and, using vulgar slurs, have floated a tax on the wearing of a hijab.
Much of the rest of their party platform also directly contravenes the Dutch constitution, in particular those clauses that proclaim
equality before the law and freedom of religion, a fact the party leader happily acknowledges. While they have vowed to set aside temporarily their more egregious proposals in order to create a viable coalition government, they have not distanced themselves from even their most violent rhetoric. At the time of writing, it seems likely that the leader of this party will become the next prime minister.
This exhibition is conceived as a gesture of protest, in the spirit of Pastor Niemöller’s poem ‘First They Came’. It draws on a history and tradition of art as protest with which, as a gallery with roots in South Africa, we are particularly familiar.
The Dutch elections happened against a global backdrop of increasing nativism and xenophobia. The levels of destruction in the DRC, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza have shattered the illusion of a livable status quo, and a long list of other conflicts fought along
religious, ethnic, ideological or national lines continue to cause untold suffering. Racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice are on the rise; violence against
the LGBTQ+ community in Amsterdam is increasingly normalised; and social media allows us to retreat ever further into dangerous echo chambers.
The title of this exhibition is a paraphrase of Rodney King’s cri de coeur at a press conference during the LA protests in the wake of the acquittal of the police officers who had brutally beaten him: ‘I just want to say – you know – can we, can we all get along?
Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?’ His sentiment was not a dismissal of protest, but an expression of the despair and hopelessness one can feel in the face of violence and pain inflicted by one human being
on another. The phrase became the name of a series of parties in Cape Town around the time of our gallery’s founding, which were a form of resistance through joy against the persistent divisions entrenched by apartheid.
We have invited some 45 artists and writers from or living in the Netherlands to make a
contribution to our protest in any form they feel appropriate.
Machteld Aardse & Femke Kempkes with Levison Gijsbertha
Parvez Alam
Cian-Yu Bai
Marwan Bassiouni
Desiré van den Berg
BSDWCORP.
Rineke Dijkstra
Brian Elstak
Fix Everything
Kenneth Geurts & Luna Hupperetz
Talisa Harjono
Domenique Himmelsbach de Vries
Jan Hoek
Iris Kensmil
Natasja Kensmil
Charlie Koolhaas
Anouk Kruithof
Nokukhanya Langa
Benjamin Li
Sjoerd Martens
Neo Matloga
Meersoortig Collectief
Marjo Meijer
Tumelo Mtimkhulu
Anke Noorman
Oey Tjeng Sit
Anna-Bella Papp
Bruin Parry
Mounir Raji
Tadhg Read
Klaas Rommelaere
Dion Rosina
Sam Samiee
Viviane Sassen
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum
Thato Toeba
Jan Voss
Tommy Wieringa
Farren van Wyk
Curated by
Xiaoxiao Xu Joost Bosland
Famil Zaman Noëlle de Haan
When Hell Breaks Loose I'll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind, No Man's Art Gallery, 2023, Amsterdam
The rooms of No Man’s Art Gallery show over two-hundred rarely exhibited drawings - spanning from 2008 - 2023 - that are thematically divided into landscape and flora, imaginative scenes, figuration and still life. The title of the exhibition alludes to an overarching theme throughout the artist's artistic and research-based endeavours: voicing a poetic eroticism or playfulness in the light of crises.
Samiee refers to his practice as post-cinematic. Central to his practice are installations embedded within the architecture of the exhibition space. The way they are edited relate to the process of playing with semantics. An example of this is seen in relation to his models, friends and conversants, revealing a deep connection of shared moments and dialogue that influenced sensual, political and relational elements guided by the artist's long involvement in psychoanalytic settings and thinking.
While Samiee separates and engages independently with drawing as a rationalist enterprise of measuring and recording the real world, his other endeavour, poetry and deconstruction of language, intertwines as subject matter of the drawings. Drawing and visual arts are put to work to materialise notions, concepts and abstract constellations that have seemingly lost their touch with materiality. Finding life-driven forces within situations that are deadening; finding a playfulness at the moment of drawing still life, machines and objects of everyday life; envisioning familiar and unfamiliar landscapes of mountains and lowlands, and collecting thoughts and ideas for a future view. Through the unique installation of the drawing archive, new connections appear between nodal points of the works.
His drawings breathe life into verses from poetry, figures from world mythology, and his own lines, avoiding mere literary illustration. An abstract scene of a lover's embrace is interlaced with a written fragment of Mohammad Reza Sharjarian's "A Lover's Plight," a Persian song calling on lovers to pour their hearts into their cups like tulips blushing. Samiee's recurring exploration of the connection between a verse of poetry and drawing or painting such as in his use of the promethean motif, leads to fresh interpretations and interconnectedness among these semantic points.
Amid over two hundred drawings we find scenes of mourning, death, the crucifixion and Iran-Iraq war tragedies yet always with the presence of the sanctuary that is beauty. The drawings invite access to the subtext of Samiee’s oeuvre, as amongst the chaos it is the beautiful thighs, chests, the Mountains Zagros Ranges and the blossoming orchid branch that offer solace.
Seen from a chronological point of view, and if compared with the exhibiting trajectory of the artist, one is able to observe how Samiee challenges literary hegemony within his culture and others by infusing architecture, physicality, color, and line into a playful discourse. His work exposes and puts on trial ideologies that regulate bodies, allowing both himself and viewers to confront the material reality of his subjects. In his more recent drawings, an embrace of the decorative and the poetic become increasingly visible.
When Hell Breaks Loose I'll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind reveals a decade of the backstage of the artist practice, research, obsessions, tests and notes which hold together a wide range of emotions, fantasies, and ideas that Samiee has relied on or will return to in the future of his ongoing explorations.
175 Trials & Errors, Solo exhibition, Dastan's Basement, 2023, Tehran
175 Trials & Errors is Samiee's tribute to "drawing" as the foundation of painting. Samiee believes drawing serves rationalism and structure to painting (every metamorphosis in the structure of a painting presupposes a mutation in the drawing). Samiee studied painting under teachers in Iran and the Netherlands who saw drawing as its cornerstone. He has been drawing since 2005 yet has never made a solo exhibit of such works. "175 Trials & Errors" braves to show works that paved the way for Samiee's artistic experimentations through trial and error. Drawings of Samiee are thematically hung (figures, flowers, landscapes, and imaginative drawings) within the restructured interior of Dastan's Basement that the artist has done. The exhibit’s title lays bare the artist's relationship with his creations – the humble self-organization of drawing.
A Garden of Clouds, Kunstinstituut Melly, 2022, Rotterdam
The exhibition A Garden of Clouds by painter Sam Samiee explores processes of symbolic social ‘anchoring’ in different times — under different names — and amid a dream-scape of clouds.
A Garden of Cloudsis inspired by a close engagement with the Rotterdam Stadsarchief, to look at the construction of our Cool neighborhood in the 1870s, following cholera and tuberculosis epidemics. During this time, the botanical garden and Clinical School (1828–1866) were transformed into a newly built environment including our former namesake the Witte de Withstraat. Today the botanical garden is known by the Boomgaardsstraat or ‘Orchard Street’, the smaller and quieter street that references the natural environment and gardens existing in this area of Rotterdam prior to its urban development. Together with Research and Programs Manager Vivian Ziherl, Samiee has consulted city maps, journals and a botanical catalog holding pressed botanical specimens.
For Samiee theGarden of Cloudsis a site of day-dreaming and association. The artist draws upon his psychoanalytic training to contemplate the two personae of our name change — the seventeenth-century colonial Admiral Witte Corneliszoon de With after whom the Witte de Withstraat is named, and the former art student Melly Shum whose image appears on the Boomgaardstraat in a billboard by Canadian artist Ken Lum. Images of plant specimens, medical history, Persian gardens and Dutch maritime painting are brought together with portraits of de With and Shum as ‘floating signifiers’. Between layers of history, Samiee welcomes a collective renegotiation of the colonial patriarch as a symbolic father.
This exhibition takes place as part of ourAnchoredseries, which explores the histories of our building, street, and neighborhood. The presentation takes place alongsideRotterdam Cultural Histories #22: Hortus Botanicus, presented in partnership with the Rotterdam Stadsarchief and presenting newly recovered nineteenth-century maps and a plant catalog. The exhibitionA Garden of Cloudsis developed with the support of Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the Rotterdam City Archive will launch a new page dedicated to the botanical garden and Clinical School — a new addition to their online documents of the city.
This special edition of FOCUS marks the launch of our autumn/winter exhibition program with a round-table conversation on intimate grammars – discussing works in film and painting through the politics of location, translation, day-dreaming, and resignification.Audiences are welcome from 4 pm onwards for a preview of two exhibitions; The Navel of the Dream a solo exhibition by Puerto Rican artist and film-maker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz; and A Garden of Clouds, an Anchored-commission by Iranian painter Sam Samiee.At 5 pm, a round-table will be held exploring these exhibitions and the dialogues between them, joined by special guests; writer and curator Francis Mc Kee (CCA Glasgow), and anthropologist and film-maker Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Columbia University / Karrabing Film Collective).Presenting a body of new and existing work, Santiago Muñoz’s The Navel of the Dream addresses translation as a hybrid linguistic and territorial concern. Methodologically Santiago Muñoz explores a process of making work from different places in the Caribbean region, and how to speak and form coherence across these. The exhibition centers on a recent work El cuervo, la fosa y la yega / The Raven, the Trench, and the Mare (2021). The film focuses on an attempt to translate Marcel Proust’s famous fin de siècle exploration of self-narration and signification Á la temps perdu / In search of lost time into Haitian Kreyòl by playwright Guy Régis Jr. Sam Samiee’s cycle of new painting A Garden of Clouds is similarly interested in signification and location, albeit among the layers of one site in particular. This is the current building of Kunstinstituut Melly which stands on the corner of its former namesake the Witte de Withstraat and the smaller and quieter Boomgaardsstraat or ‘Orchard Street’. This used to be the perimeter of a Botanical Garden up until the neighborhood was urbanized following tuberculosis and cholera outbreaks. In A Garden of Clouds, the artist draws upon his psychoanalytic training to welcome a collective renegotiation of the colonial patriarch as a symbolic father through daydream and ‘floating signifiers’.Francis McKee is a renowned writer and critic, and director of the CCA Glasgow. His essay ‘Universal Copernican Mumbles’ was published as part of Munoz’s monograph A Universe of Mirrors published by the Perez Art Museum (Miami). The term ‘intimate grammars’ is borrowed from Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s text of the same title, which discusses the emergence of a coherent and durable subject through language in light of the non-translatability of colonial space-time and territory.The program will be moderated by Research and Programs Manager Vivian Ziherl, who will be joined by Annalee Davis and Iyawo (Holly Bynoe) from Sour Grass. Santiago Muñoz’s The Navel of the Dream is presented as part of Gatherings and Passages, a long-term collaboration between Sour Grass and Kunstinstituut Melly creating a dialogue between the Netherlands and the Caribbean.
The Sites of Ruin, Group Exhibition, 12 Gates, Philadelphia, 2022
An exhibition of paintings accompanied with excerpts of modern and classical Persian poetry,“Blush of the Soil” surveys multiple painterly and poetic registers. The artist invites us to experiencehis personal journey at an unusually intimate level. Setting out more than a decade, Samiee returnshome more than just a traveler: a pilgrim. Laden with both glory and defeat comes a difficult choice:what message and what gifts does one return bearing? This exhibition is a testament to both the freedom and the restraint that Sam Samiee has practiced incarefully crafting that message. Manifold and layered: his work leaks from the Nastaliq discourse ofpoetic titles that line the walls, holding each painting. It dances on the canvas like a colorful witnessto the hard-won freedom of his movements. It hides behind the pillars that usually carry Samiee’s work: poetry and painting, their traditional forms ground up and melted to resemble the mercury that allows for contemporary usage. Like with mirrors, the message thrown back at the viewer is usually a reflection of themselves.The first item to prominently emerge from Samiee’s suitcase is the very axiom of the show. An ode tothe premise of premises: death, inevitably so. As an homage to Hans Holbein (the Younger)’s TheBody of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, this painting removes from death both the glory and thetragedy of dying. Forget the idealistic, abstract concept of death: here, we have an importantmoment in art history re-signified by Samiee, something as tangible as the luscious stems of Omar Khayyam’s tulips that emerge from the very dust that we all turn into. Apart from the vivid coloursscraped free from beneath the blackness, Dead Christ in Coffin carries Samiee’s experience ofhaving tailored the painting to the size of a coffin that would carry his body.But before that, we are invited to a celebration of uncertainty. The brushstrokes and colours ofSamiee’s Untitled works serve as an ode to the difficult journey towards relinquishing control. In Bonnard à la Foerg, Samiee salutes his fellow pilgrims on their path: Bonnard, forever porous in hisdepiction of the world, and Foerg, who seems to have arrived at freedom by climbing through a vastnumber of rigid frames.This lesson is one that Samiee wishes to impart upon his return home: embrace uncertainty. Cherishit like the moment the curtain opens to a stage; ripe with potential and possibility, the vague outlineof an adventure yet to be had — even if the Elephants might Stumble. Doubt becomes an ingredientintegral to preventing our societies from turning into stone. The Scent of Dawn evokes this exact imagery: something we might not yet be able to touch and see, but can nevertheless perceive withour more intuitive senses.Now, how we deal with this first premise is entirely up to us. Does death — be it our own, or that ofour gods — constitute the beginning or the end of freedom? The loss of control, or the foundation thereof? When we eventually make it to While Cloudbursts at Nowruz Wash the Tulip's Face andNameless Flower, will we witness the fresh naïveté and the overwhelming beauty of the scenery asan external phenomenon, or as something that not only has the potential of emerging from ourminds, but from our very bodies, turned to dust? After all, what are we but soil, blushing, after aspring shower? We are escorted out by two promethean allegories: the Greek Titan, supreme trickster andcontemporary symbol for the industrial, mechanic, phallic energy, has broken his chains. The worldaround him is cratered with death, famine and discrimination fanned by the fear of the unknown.After a lifetime of dealing in fire and fury, Prometheus fills his fists, this time around with colours,female energy, the gestures of dancing, and uncertainty. We witness a humble world that will, alas,never be. Or will it?It is with this question, nay, this challenge, that the last piece is pulled from the suitcase. And yet, thepilgrim blushes with shame at the humbleness of his mementoes. For all the weight he has carriedhome, his gift is but a promise: like a visitor to a garden, intoxicated by his journey, he cannot bringflowers. He can only speak of their fragrance, and invite each viewer to search for the gate of that garden within themselves. The real treasure is as priceless as it is simple: a handful of blushing soil. Shanay Hubmann
* Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French illustrator, printmaker and painter who is known for the decorative qualities of his work. Leaving Paris andsettling in Provence, he dedicated his time to painting nature and his wife, and contrary to other avant-garde painters, created implications ofconfusion and uncertainty in his style of painting. His work has been recently gone through review, many believing his importance among post-warartists to be comparable to Henri Matisse.
** Günther Förg (1952-2013) was a German graphic designer, sculptor and photographer who began his career by photographing architecturefocusing on window frames, specifically in fascist architecture. During his life and work, he followed a path of lyrical abstraction, taking an anti-fascistapproach and following the footsteps of Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly.
Sam Samiee wishes to thank the team at Dastan’s Basement, specifically Roshan Takallomi and Sam Roknivand, for their help insetting up this exhibition. The research and writing of this text would not have been possible without the help of Shanay Hubmann andRiaz Howey.I like to dedicate this exhibition to Lily Mansouri who gave me my first Gulistan of Sa'adi. Sam Samiee December 2020.
Minefield Playground, Duo Exhibition Fereydoun Ave & Sam Samiee, Hamzianpour & Kia Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022
Warrior’s Rest is part of Fereydoun Ave’s ongoing Warrior series, which has continuallyproblematized the relationship between the warrior archetype and its historical, literary, andmythological iterations. All along, Ave has rigorously questioned and subverted thedefinitions of masculinity embodied by the warrior, cultivating a tense relationship betweenthe macho characters in the works and the decidedly non-macho elements that surroundthem. In Warrior’s Rest, the warriors are once again depicted with iconography thatinterrogates the hardness and harshness traditionally associated with masculinity; however,the overarching sensation here is not one of tension but, as the series’ title suggests, arestfulness. The warriors are presented in various states of repose, stripped of all forms ofarmor (literal and figurative), naked and prone yet fully at rest. Their bodies and the objectsaround them – flowers, bedsheets, carpets, plants – exude a so ness and sensuality thatgoes beyond previous works in the Warrior series. Even the helmet, a powerfully iconicelement of the warrior image, is treated with affection – an ever-present partner whose placeis no longer on the hero’s head and so can no longer mask the warrior’s individual identity orobscure his humanity. As such, these works constitute an expression of Ave’s wish “that menwill tire of war and from time to time want to rest.” In some instances, Ave goes so far as toreduce the warrior to a mere shadow, an absent presence, ephemeral and ethereal – nothingmore and nothing less than an idea that materializes briefly and then recedes out ofmateriality. The same interplay of material and immaterial informs the show’s other series by Ave, TwoAlphabets. While alphabets are the material dimension of language – its building blocks, as itwere – Mr. Ave treats them in a way that both acknowledges and vitiates their materiality. Thealphabetical letters are stripped of their primary function (communication) and endowed withthe freedom to PLAY. Crucially, the letters are arranged so as to resist any kind of a reading –literal or figurative – and empowered to behave independently of any imposed or expectedfunctionality. As Roland Barthes has said of the work of Cy Twombly (who was in fact, one ofAve’s mentors), the letters are presented with a kind of indolence, like a garment that has beenworn and deposited on the floor – though Ave’s approach to the alphabet is an indolence bornnot of sloth but of a deliberate playfulness, a desire to let their graphic (rather thaniconographic) essence emerge. This allows the two alphabets - Latin and Perso-Arabic - to enterinto a spirited dialogue, emanating an intimacy which foregrounds the fact that they are bothbranches of the same (Indo European) language tree.Ave has o en presented his work in the form of co-operative shows, and for this show he hascalled on Sam Samiee to create an installation incorporating both artists’ work. Samiee’s ownwork is characterized by a break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the questionof how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphorfor a set of ideas. In designing this exhibition, Samiee treats the gallery as an editable spacewhose possibilities and limitations can be used, manipulated, and unmade as the artist sees fit.Samiee considers the work of installation as a performative act; and indeed the entire showbecomes a performance that immerses viewers in the environment, incorporating them asco-performers in a work whose scale far exceeds the sum of the physical objects present. Usingboth two-dimensional media and spatial objects, Samiee amplifies the sense of beauty andcolor in Ave’s pieces while simultaneously mediating and altering the gaze that is directed atthose pieces -- pushing viewers to be present to their own presence in the gallery space and totheir own part in creating a discursive relationship with the individual works and with theexhibit as a whole.In his work, Samiee endeavors to synthesize the visual culture of the West with the heavilyword-centered culture of the East; his approach is grounded in part in his research and lectureson Iranian art history and the ways in which Iranian modernists reconciled the new canons ofWestern art with their local frameworks of art production That research has brought him tocontemplate and find insight into the role of Fereydoun Ave within Iranian art history and hiscontribution to the evolution of Global Modernism -- a subject which Samiee further engageswith and elucidates in this show. In addition, Samiee highlights how Ave’s work celebrates thefascination with male beauty, referencing in particular the Greek notions of the masculine idealwhile at the same time pointing out an ugliness behind the machismo of war and destruction –intensifying the poetic aspects of awe and dejection one finds in masculinity and its attendantbeauty.In Ave’s pieces, images are conjoined to create scenographic essays; and so Samiee’s workhere can be read as a scenography of scenographies, hinting at a fractal relationship betweenthe two artists and their work. In this way Samiee ramps up the playfulness and evades what hecalls “the mine-field of the mind-field” – the temptation for artists to think too much about whatparts of the collaborative work are “mine” and what parts are not.
The Two-Headed Horse, Duo Exhibition with Agnieszka Polska, Geroge Kargl Galerie, 2021, Vienna
As we continue past the painful births of modernism and digitalisation into today’s world, we begin to conceive the amniotic fluid that gavebirth to Samiee and Polska: contemporary poets whose process of chewing up and spewing out the world is no longer kicked into gear by thebucolic walk in the countryside. Gone are the days of Linnaeus, Freud and Jung where it was possible to classify the world: we are now in a timeof chaos, and our artists draw from the infinity of data - images, sounds, letters and words - that are thrown at us as we venture through life inthe 21st century.
Both artists, each in their own way, lift this mammoth and hurl it at us, be it on a canvas or on a screen. Their works carry more than just avisual experience: Samiee’s works are depictions of the mind, frames within frames. We witness more than just paint: there is dance, thereare words, there are after-images that spring from a dark matter that projects them, from inside, into our mind.
Polska creates verses with her immersive visuals: landscapes of subconsciousness, laced with words, spoken and sung in an otherworldlyfashion that leaves us questioning the absolute value of time. Through seemingly empty scenarios, we are transported into our pandemic-eraconfinement through the eyes of a couple, encapsulated in a bubble of intimacy and love, observing the world through a digital peephole. Andthe world stares back as it melts into pixels and re-emerges into new landscapes: “Love is a token in the data market”, says the demon. Anoffering we must make in order to participate. It seems we have finally gazed long enough into the abyss: the abyss is gazing into us.Andhereweare,ourwanderingmindsanarchive,evermultiplyingthisabundanceofimpulses,thismagnitudeofnothingness.Wearesurroundedby a crescendo of data and information, and our overwhelmed brains cannot but see God: when confronted with a boundless phenomenon beyond comprehension, we cannot but take shelter inthe concept of the divine.
And yet, in this primordial soup of everything, thereis also a great deal of nothing. The image of the thingis but the absence of the thing**. We witness iconsreduced to ashes, once holy words losing their spell asthey flicker across a propaganda screen; works of artturn into inflation and deflation in a blatant display ofthe absurdity of assigning excess value to empty things.And thus, surrounded by noise, we enter the hall ofknights. “Noise is defined by scale”, we respond to thedemon:thespellisbroken. Wewitnessthetwo-headedhorse, a dancing image, bathed in an angelic voice. Andwe are left wondering whether we found the sense inall this abundance, whether we managed to surpassthe scale. Like King Arthur, we have a go at extractingExcalibur. Will we?
Shanay Hubmann
Here Comes Everybody, Duo Show with Narcisse Tordoir, Emergent, 2021, Veurne
What Joyce does to literature is what Samiee and Tordoir are bravely attempting to do to art. The exhibition begins with death and ends with afuneral. But the red line we planned to follow through the space turns out to be, instead, a horizon. We become part of a conversation betweentwo brilliant minds, with subjects cherry-picked and yet related in a multitude of ways. The ground we are about to cover expands, literally,across the entire world. How is this possible? The answer is simple: this exhibition, much like the plot of Finnegan’s Wake and the Quran, takesplace in the dreams of prophets.
The story told across the various spaces of HCE is one of renewal: the annihilation of the Self that both Islamic mystics as well as westernphilosophers so often refer and aspire to. We begin the journey by witnessing the killing of our main characters! But this “first act” is more thanjust a town square execution for us to watch: it is an invitation. To join both artists in first acknowledging and then challenging the ego.
Every attempt to describe Samiee and Tordoir’s interaction leads me to the imagery of a dance; and not necessarily one between humans. Whatmakes both artists stand out is their ability to “create works without seeing them”, to begin a journey without a clear image of the finish line. It isone thing to allow this freedom in one’s own work, another to attempt it when entangled in somebody else’s arms. The magic of collectivity, asan unfinished ode to Modernism, takes place as a collage: one dances in the other’s adoration. One’s excess spills into the other’s containment.
Prints. Photographs. Spray paint: the slow weaving of a nest in whichwe, the witness, can rest ever so briefly. From there experience theartworks - positioned sometimes separate, sometimes complimentary,sometimes overlapping - the way we experience a dream. Rationalitywould never be enough to explain such phenomena. And this is key.And so we continue our journey through the space, towards anotherlate guest at this exhibition: Pier Paolo Pasolini, who perfected thewalk of the rational-emotional tightrope: a gay marxist fascinated withhistorical materialism, celebrated by the average man for providing a(more recent) lens through which to gaze into more distant history. TheGospel According to St. Matthew and 1001 Nights serve as an ode tocelebrate his humane and mystical understanding of reality. Modern andContemporary Art being flush with anti-religiosity and anti-mysticism,thelikesofPasolinishowedushowtofullyembracetheseworldswithoutsurrendering the rational one - often at the cost of their lives. We arereminded to go above and beyond clichés and identity politics.
“Here Comes Everybody” serves as a memorial of all those who cannotbe here - whose lives were interrupted by the hostile conditions thatforbade history from ripening. We get a sense of how much more thereis to explore, and that this is only a beginning.
Shanay Hubmann
به بهانه نمایشگاه سام سمیعی با عنوان «گلگون خاک» در گالری دستان
در ثنای حضور و تجربه حس
نویسنده:احسان آجورلو
مجله نگاه فرد
بهمن ۱۳۹۹
"The works internally have an intertextual relationship with the world outside of themselves. The artist has left this very discovery of therelations to the memory of the viewer. The significant point though is that before each piece, besides the realisation of such relationsand the semantics in them, the viewer is brought in the play too. In this game the viewer might, based on her momentary feelings, re-member suspended notions and break their sequences. This is the very end in itself for Samiee. The narratives of Samiee’s works arenot closed and are not singular; he begins a game with the viewer the precondition of which is the sensual and immanent perception ofviewer [...] This is apparent in the Iesvs Nazareus, Rex Ivdaervm. Besides the intertextual aspect of the work, it is through the sensualperception of the work that the meaning appears through the black of the canvas. This is why The Blush of the Soil is a performancerather than being a painting exhibition. The presence of the viewer that realises the narrative of the exhibition. This is completed whenthe viewer leaves the gallery." (Translation from Persian, Negah-e-No Magazine, Ehsan Ajorlou, 2021)
The Blush of the Soil, Solo Exhibition, Dastan Gallery, 2020
An exhibition of paintings accompanied with excerpts of modern and classical Persian poetry,“Blush of the Soil” surveys multiple painterly and poetic registers. The artist invites us to experiencehis personal journey at an unusually intimate level. Setting out more than a decade, Samiee returnshome more than just a traveler: a pilgrim. Laden with both glory and defeat comes a difficult choice:what message and what gifts does one return bearing? This exhibition is a testament to both the freedom and the restraint that Sam Samiee has practiced incarefully crafting that message. Manifold and layered: his work leaks from the Nastaliq discourse ofpoetic titles that line the walls, holding each painting. It dances on the canvas like a colorful witnessto the hard-won freedom of his movements. It hides behind the pillars that usually carry Samiee’s work: poetry and painting, their traditional forms ground up and melted to resemble the mercury that allows for contemporary usage. Like with mirrors, the message thrown back at the viewer is usually a reflection of themselves.The first item to prominently emerge from Samiee’s suitcase is the very axiom of the show. An ode tothe premise of premises: death, inevitably so. As an homage to Hans Holbein (the Younger)’s TheBody of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, this painting removes from death both the glory and thetragedy of dying. Forget the idealistic, abstract concept of death: here, we have an importantmoment in art history re-signified by Samiee, something as tangible as the luscious stems of Omar Khayyam’s tulips that emerge from the very dust that we all turn into. Apart from the vivid coloursscraped free from beneath the blackness, Dead Christ in Coffin carries Samiee’s experience ofhaving tailored the painting to the size of a coffin that would carry his body.But before that, we are invited to a celebration of uncertainty. The brushstrokes and colours ofSamiee’s Untitled works serve as an ode to the difficult journey towards relinquishing control. In Bonnard à la Foerg, Samiee salutes his fellow pilgrims on their path: Bonnard, forever porous in hisdepiction of the world, and Foerg, who seems to have arrived at freedom by climbing through a vastnumber of rigid frames.This lesson is one that Samiee wishes to impart upon his return home: embrace uncertainty. Cherishit like the moment the curtain opens to a stage; ripe with potential and possibility, the vague outlineof an adventure yet to be had — even if the Elephants might Stumble. Doubt becomes an ingredientintegral to preventing our societies from turning into stone. The Scent of Dawn evokes this exact imagery: something we might not yet be able to touch and see, but can nevertheless perceive withour more intuitive senses.Now, how we deal with this first premise is entirely up to us. Does death — be it our own, or that ofour gods — constitute the beginning or the end of freedom? The loss of control, or the foundation thereof? When we eventually make it to While Cloudbursts at Nowruz Wash the Tulip's Face andNameless Flower, will we witness the fresh naïveté and the overwhelming beauty of the scenery asan external phenomenon, or as something that not only has the potential of emerging from ourminds, but from our very bodies, turned to dust? After all, what are we but soil, blushing, after aspring shower? We are escorted out by two promethean allegories: the Greek Titan, supreme trickster andcontemporary symbol for the industrial, mechanic, phallic energy, has broken his chains. The worldaround him is cratered with death, famine and discrimination fanned by the fear of the unknown.After a lifetime of dealing in fire and fury, Prometheus fills his fists, this time around with colours,female energy, the gestures of dancing, and uncertainty. We witness a humble world that will, alas,never be. Or will it?It is with this question, nay, this challenge, that the last piece is pulled from the suitcase. And yet, thepilgrim blushes with shame at the humbleness of his mementoes. For all the weight he has carriedhome, his gift is but a promise: like a visitor to a garden, intoxicated by his journey, he cannot bringflowers. He can only speak of their fragrance, and invite each viewer to search for the gate of that garden within themselves. The real treasure is as priceless as it is simple: a handful of blushing soil. Shanay Hubmann
* Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French illustrator, printmaker and painter who is known for the decorative qualities of his work. Leaving Paris andsettling in Provence, he dedicated his time to painting nature and his wife, and contrary to other avant-garde painters, created implications ofconfusion and uncertainty in his style of painting. His work has been recently gone through review, many believing his importance among post-warartists to be comparable to Henri Matisse.
** Günther Förg (1952-2013) was a German graphic designer, sculptor and photographer who began his career by photographing architecturefocusing on window frames, specifically in fascist architecture. During his life and work, he followed a path of lyrical abstraction, taking an anti-fascistapproach and following the footsteps of Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly.
Sam Samiee wishes to thank the team at Dastan’s Basement, specifically Roshan Takallomi and Sam Roknivand, for their help insetting up this exhibition. The research and writing of this text would not have been possible without the help of Shanay Hubmann andRiaz Howey.I like to dedicate this exhibition to Lily Mansouri who gave me my first Gulistan of Sa'adi. Sam Samiee December 2020.
Theologia Theatrica of Koh-i-Noor & Darya-i-Noor, The Spark Is You, The Parasol unit Foundation, 2019, London
...A sense of duality exist within their works. concepts standing from private and collective experiences and a common heritage of po-
etry is evidence through the use of metaphor and parable [...] A series of Persian folk-tales are symbolized in these dynamic installa-tions by Sam Samiee. The Fabulous Theology of Koh i Noor and the Fabulous seek to unmake the establish narratives. Koh i Noor and Darya i Noor which translate into Mountain of Light and the Sea of Light are the name of the two largest cut diamonds in the world,each with a dramatic history steeped in conflict and intrigue. while both can be seen as symbols of wealth, power and the masculinedesire to dominate the world, here Samiee links this power to the ingenuity and intelligence showed by Shahrzad and Dinazad in talestold in One Thousand and One Night.
In The Fabulous Theology of Koh-i-noor and The Fabulous Theology of Darya-i-noor, Sam Samiee presents a layered installation of two- and three-dimensional objects that spill onto the gallery floor. Central to Samiee’s work is the idea of ‘unmaking’ established narratives with more fluid, separate components. ‘Koh-i-noor’ and ‘Darya-i-noor’, which respectively translate to the ‘Mountain of Light’ and ‘Sea of Light’, are conjured here with Samiee’s monolithic installation Koh-i-noor and the low, lush Darya-i-noor.
Samiee plays with the duality between concrete and abstract signifiers through invoking the famous Koh-i-noor and Darya-i-noor diamonds, the largest cut diamonds in the world. One is now located in London and the other in Tehran. Each has a dramatic history steeped in conflict and intrigue, falling into the hands of many rulers over the centuries. In contrast to these fetishised symbols of domination, Samiee embodies the Koh-i-noor and Darya-i-noor abstractly as Shahrzad and her sister Dinazad from One Thousand and One Nights. (Their names originate from Sangehavak and Arvehavak; in Persian, the word Sang means stone and Arv means river.) In the Nights, Shahrzad regaled enchanting stories night after night with her sister for the mythological Persian monarch Shahryar to avoid being put to death. Through her seduction, Shahrzad ‘unmakes’ the domineering ruler. Similarly, Samiee presents a series of fragmented assemblages to deconstruct these symbols of power.
The Spark Is You: Venice + London, 2019
In May 2019 and in celebration of its 15th anniversary, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art presented two concurrent group exhibitions of works by contemporary Iranian artists. The Spark Is You: Parasol unit in Venice, a collateral event to the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia took place at the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia and featured nine Iranian artists: Morteza Ahmadvand | Nazgol Ansarinia | Siah Armajani | Mitra Farahani | Sahand Hesamiyan | Y.Z. Kami | Farideh Lashai | Koushna Navabi | Navid NuurNine Iranian Artists in London: The Spark Is You was presented at Parasol unit in London and featured: Morteza Ahmadvand | Nazgol Ansarinia | Ghazaleh Hedayat | Sahand Hesamiyan | Koushna Navabi | Navid Nuur | Sam Samiee | Hadi Tabatabai | Hossein ValamaneshBoth curated by Ziba Ardalan and presented through a prism of classical Persian poetry, the exhibitions fittingly coincided with the 200th anniversary of West-oestlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan), 1819, a book of lyrical poems written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in homage to the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez.Curated by Ziba Ardalan, Founder, Artistic and Executive Director of Parasol unit foundation for contemporary artFilmed by Sonny Sanjay VadgamaVoice-over by Kirsteen Cairns
On Shahrzad and the Eternal Feminine,
Artist talk at the Parasol unit Foundation for contemporary arts, 2019, London
In this talk, artist Sam Samiee explores themes related to his new installations,The Fabulous Theology of Koh-i-noorandThe Fabulous Theology of Darya-i-noor, both 2019, created for the current exhibition at Parasol unit. Referencing the two largest diamonds in the world, Koh-i-noor and Darya-i-noor, Samiee deconstructs and contrasts these fetishized symbols of power and domination to Shahrzad and her sister Dinazad fromOne Thousand and One Nights.
He asks the question: ‘What would Shahrzad inOne Thousand and One Nightsdo if she had to paint?’
The merger of more than one canon in different fields of art within the Iranian cultural territoryhas been studied well, like in case of literature and cinema. Yet there is little depth when it comes to how the Iranian modernists reconciled the new arriving canons with their local frameworks of art production. Taking it from the question of ‘Adab’ as the mode of being for the subject of the Persianate world and applying it to visual arts canons, artistSam Samieewill elaborate on the essential example of Adab, being theOne Thousand and One Nights. Departing from that, the question is ‘What would Shahrzad do if she had to paint?’
From Bahram Beyzaei’s Geneology of the Ancient Tree to Manichean literature influencing the post-Islamic Persian poetry, Samiee will cover methodologies through which the example of Shahrzad of theOne Thousand and One Nightsproduces a particular mode of being for the artist in which the aesthetics and ethics are of the same category: Adab. Through that one can re-read the world history of visual arts as well as other forms of aesthetics from the point of view of Shahrzad and her ‘feminine-maternal ethical responsibility for the other’.
Love gone vagabond, Intellect fell after it,«عشق آواره شد خرد در جستجویش», De liefde raakte ontheemd, het verstaand er naar opzoek, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 2018
Iranian-born artist and essayist Sam Samiee (b. 1988, Teheran) makes installations consisting of multiple paintings. He combines this two-dimensional medium with spatial objects, testing the potential and the limits of traditional painting.
Samiee is also a researcher, exploring western painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis and studying the rich history of Persian literature. He attempts in his work to unite the west’s visual culture with the east’s word-oriented culture. By breaking with the tradition of the two-dimensional painting, he repeatedly questions how an artist can portray the three-dimensional world. As he himself says, ‘Painting is a way of further developing and shaping all my ideas and thoughts’.
Samiee, who works in Amsterdam, Berlin and Teheran, and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Amsterdam in 2014-2015, will be presenting an installation combining works from 2014 to the present day in the Gemeentemuseum’s Projects Gallery. He will also integrate into the installation a number of paintings from the museum’s collection, by the artists Constant, Paul Thek and Emo Verkerk, with whom he feels a kinship.
De liefde raakte ontheemd, het verstand ernaar op zoek - Sam Samiee in Gemeentemuseum
10.09.2018 |REVIEW —Nathalie van der Lely
Metropolis M
"Samiee is an artist whose work gains expressiveness through the choice of title;image and text, content and form reinforce each other.You walk through the Persian poem, as it were, without the installation degenerating into a literal illustration."
The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (After Laplanche) at We Don't Need Another Hero, Berlin Biennale X, Z/KU, Berlin, 2018
Talking to Sam Samiee about his painting practice is an utterly high-speed undertaking. He belongs to that rare group of artists who like to talk– and listen. The amount of knowledge that the painter pours into the first few minutes of a dialogue is impressive. He moves seamlessly fromthe ninthcentury invention of Farsi to how this coincided with the emergence of painting in the West as a technique to negotiate metaphys-ics, and then to contemporary psychoanalysis, culminating in possible answers to the question of why Germans still haven’t learned to mournproperly. This all makes sense considering Samiee’s background. Born and raised in Tehran, the artist completed his formal education in theNetherlands and currently lives and works in Berlin. The painter’s intellectual trajectories are emblematic of his visual landscapes; which isnot to say they are the same. He is well aware of when to apply which mode of communication. His installations, often composed of paintingsand objects, break open the normative order and iconography of traditional European painting. Samiee synthesizes this history with one of hisrecent research interests, the Persian term adab, used to describe the dual concept of ethics and aesthetics. His work is heavily influenced byPersian literary legacies and their close kinship to contemporary psychoanalysis. Fusing these knowledge systems allows the artist to enterinto or create new spaces and temporalities, beginning on the canvas and usually extending into the three-dimensional exhibition space withthe support of objects as a means of challenging hegemonic visual practices. This approach is always driven by a desire to deflect the condi-tioned gaze of viewers and witnesses from conventional interpretations or processes of meaning-making towards new fields of possibility; aprocedure that evolves from the attempt to unhinge familiar subjectivities or positions of subjecthood, blurring the idea of the self-contained,rational Western subject. In Samiee›s oeuvre this manifests itself in what he calls “shrines of abstract art,” heterodimensional spaces that allow the viewer to mourn, reflect, and pause for a moment.For example, assembled in the gallery space his paintings TheBedroom Posters (2015-16) depict the queering of (male-as-cribed) physiques or disproportionately painted celestial con-stellations installed next to the warm light of a bedside lamp.As a whole, such constellations of works and objects evoke asense of disorientation. They also have a performative char-acter; Samiee’s installations prompt viewers to physically sit-uate themselves in space and attune themselves to the at-mosphere. One can read this as a call to temporarily acceptdisturbing environments, unknown and unfamiliar, which ulti-mately invite us to actively participate in the birthing of new,more interrelated worlds. Leading up to the 10th Berlin Bien-nale, Samiee continued his explorations of the idea of adabduring a two-month studio residency at the ZK/U-Center forArt and Urbanistics, where his work The Unfinished Coperni-can Revolution (2018) is on view. – Magnus Elias Rosengarten