Flowers of Sadness by
Flowers of Sadness
Acrylic on Canvas,
photographed by Jonathan de Waart
No Man's Art Gallery
The Specter of the Liberty on B1, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
20 x 30 cm
The Trophies is shaped by an urgency and generosity toward those Samiee portrays, by a sustained commitment to queer aesthetics in times of crisis, and by adab; an aesthetics inseparable from ethics. Such as the homage to Shiraz and the story of Abish Khatun of the Salghurid dynasty, a queen remembered in legend as having offered herself in marriage to Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, when he reached Estakhr near Shiraz. In that account, she names her mahrieh not in gold or land, but in the city itself: Shiraz. A sacrifice by seduction that led to the sparing of the city. The portraits in this show, at first sight, form an unlikely gathering. Rosa Luxemburg appears through her attention to flowers while imprisoned in Berlin. David Graeber enters through his writings on political possibility and collective life. Fereydoun Farrokhzad returns through memory, music and exile. Agha Shahid Ali brings together queerness, Persia, Islam and longing. James Baldwin remains present through his insistence on loving America without surrendering to it. Brown reappears as the thinker who opened pathways between Western intellectual history, Islam and Iran. Alongside them are translated poems, anonymous sitters, artist friends and fragments of political imagination that together form an unstable archive of affiliations.
“When hell breaks loose I’ll tell you your legs were always on my mind”, a line from Samiee’s poetry and previous solo show, continues to resonate throughout the exhibition. Made between Berlin, Tehran, Boston and Cambridge during a period marked by genocide, war and expanding violence reaching towards Iran, the works turn towards flowers, domestic objects and intimate gestures. They return to writers, revolutionaries and thinkers whose words accompanied the artist at moments when communication, certainty and community felt fragile.
For years, Samiee had imagined turning towards a decorative and non-phallic way of painting, toward flowers and the pleasurable, life-affirming capacities of image-making. War accelerated this impulse. Beauty and refinement became urgent rather than secondary, not distractions from politics, but ways of surviving it.
Throughout the exhibition, painting, poetry and translation move in conversation with one another. Still lifes from Berlin are painted in Tehran. Ink works begun in Boston meet portraits completed elsewhere. Places collapse into emotional and political simultaneity. In Samiee’s work, subjects and objects are not bound by the limits of the nation state, but shaped through a transnational aesthetic language. What emerges is a refusal to abandon refinement in moments of devastation. The figures and objects united less by ideology than by their capacity to speak beautifully amid catastrophe. Painting becomes a way of staying close to life while history breaks apart around it.
Listen back to the artist talk of Sam Samiee with Sara Giannini here: NMAG Storage Sessions | The Trophies.
For a survivor of war, staying alive is the utmost win. After every explosion, no
matter how one tries to ignore or disavow it, one’s life is put into perspective, an
evaluation of a sort takes place in mind, and one decides what to prioritize.
Already for some time, perhaps since the lockdowns, I had come to think of
painting flowers, and still lives, staged portraits at a corner of one’s home, as
the top priority subjects to be painted. That choice had become apparent in the
works of those artists who under conditions of war had chosen to paint flowers
and dinner tables, gardens and beautiful people. War at home accelerated that.
I felt I wanted to capture, record the plants I love so dearly at home, but also
plants that just blossom out of playing with paint.
A parallel vocation that had begun perhaps around the same time, but except
drawing one or two, the rest had been waiting to be drawn exactly in my time in
north Iran, escaping the poundings of Tehran, I felt I wanted to draw people who
had been on my mind all throughout those days of war, and mid-way, I realized
these are works I had started since I was in the United States, in October 2023.
And there were words of poets whose lines had become my obsessions, so far
so that I had to paint them off. All these three felt coming together in showing
what I had been doing during the times of war to a few friends.
Every portrait of thinker and writer in this show is of a person whose politics,
research, and scholarship had helped me think and carry on through these last
weeks of war and months.
I am calling the souvenirs of my surviving time during the past weeks of war
The Trophies, for a number of reasons. I do not wish to settle for anything less
than a victory in my feeling about how I have survived this invasion, and the
whole history that has led to this moment. So these are not mere memorabilia of
survival, after all survival sounds closer to victimhood than to triumph.
“Spiritual Triumph, over political defeat”, were the words of Norman O. Brown when he had taken up the herculean job of reading Islam and within that, Iran, as the
pioneering figure in western academy, looking at what he claimed to be the
beginning of political protests from 1164 in Alamut, Iran.
The assembly of the people whose portraits are present here has concluded
to me the importance of beauty, beauty in framing the world, beauty in talking
about the world, in itself is victory, beauty is what gives the spirit its tenderness
to thrive. I felt successful to have been able to produce images contemplating
on the beauty of plants at my home, they also carry memories, of conversations
that I have beheld in my mind, in silence and solitude, while not much could
have been said, with certain people whose thinking and writing helped me carry
through these times.
Half way drawing these figures, I realized I had begun drawing these series since
the October of 2023, while I was in United States for a short period of time, when
Gaza became the centre of the attention of the world, and while I moved through
many cities and countries, those thinkers filled in the void and the silence, when
words of citizens weren’t piercing enough to stop a war and invasion expanded
so far so that it would reach my country.
Not that there weren’t words against genocide and imperialism, tyranny and
exploitation, but that the world had become just like the dawn of the Mongol
invasion where a sage witnessing the crumbling of their world had announced,
god’s wind of needlessness has blown over the world, there is no more order for
words (logos). In that moment, keeping a memory, guarding history is the trophy
one takes to a future age.
Flowers of Sadnesswas the name I realized I wanted to give to a series of
flowers I had painted over the last years that perhaps were coming out of my
sheer feeling of helplessness and despair. The drawings of the portraits were
the opposite feeling, they were all agency, and drawing them was an emotional
catharsis of remembering the charged words and extraordinary lives of each
and every of those thinkers who thought about a better world, and they talked
and wrote about it beautifully, their aspirations was apparent in the way of their
verbalization and elaboration of their thoughts. They too, their memories, are
trophies of my living experience.
The few painted words were a different sort of trophy, they were from my desire
to translate, to capture, or to paint off an obsession that I had grown for some
verses of poems, the reverence of which had pushed me to find a way to make
them accessible to non-Persian speakers.
Under civilizational threats, these paintings and drawings are my trophies
for a victory that is in the future. They are attempts at remembrance and
monumentalization of lives and attitudes in lives for living and resistance.What
all these people share, along with having spoken and written beautifully, is their
love for love, taking love as their politics, and perhaps that’s why their writings
are so beautiful, their ethics is their aesthetics.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an Iranian singer, showman, activist and programmer,
taught Iranian audience about Vietnam, where Iranians were complicit in the
atrocities that unfolded there by the United States, he promoted talented artists,
and reminded them and their audience how to think about politics, an anti war
activist during Iran-Iraq war, he stood against tyranny at home and abroad until
he was murdered in Bonn. His music never dies.
Eqbal Ahmad, who inspired many like Edward Said, and wrote about nationalism
and spoke beautifully against the empire, the music in his voice gave conviction
to students, he gave activists and artists insights into how their cultural works
relate to war machinery and how they help the struggles of many.
Norman O. Brown, was perhaps the first in academicians whose Freudian Marxist
views of history, having been laid out in his seminal magnum opus, Life Against
Death, seemed not enough to explain why the revolution in 1979 happened in
Iran, when he set a goal for himself to understand that epistemological gap in
west on Iran and Islam, leading to his Challenge of Islam: the Prophetic Tradition,
which perhaps was the single most influential book on me helping me graduate
from my Islamophobia, while trusting his pioneering thoughts in queerness.
Perhaps standing as tall as him is David Graeber, the anthropologist whose Dawn
of Everythingwas what we kept talking about in the last months in Tehran, There
Never Was a Westwas a shocking freshness in coming to terms with how Islam
has shaped world history.
James Baldwin’s love for his country resonated so well with what I struggle with
at home. He, not an abolitionist, neither a reformist, but a lover of his country, has
been the leading star in the nights of Iranian politics. His tender queerness, his
visions shining through his literature was featured for me in the writings of Adam
Phillips, whose thinking and approach towards language and psychoanalysis
has been the single most influential thinker and writer on me. He had seen in
Baldwin the very ability to extract shame for making a better social condition
where being in another’s attention would redress one’s view of himself in the
tension of the shame which might give rise to things new.
Agha Shahid Ali’s poems, since I first read them, just switched on the light in a
world where the address for the switch was lost. His poems bring Shiism into
Hinduism, Faiz Ahmad Faiz comes in sitting next to Eqbal Ahmad who wanted
to fix the world, and Florence, Isfahan, New York, and every other city on earth,
in his kindness are sisters.
Reza Abdoh, the towering figure in theatre and performance had seen it all, had
predicted with clarity and had laid out with precision, in his most provocative
pieces that sadly had been under the dust of forgetfulness for a world that has
too little order for words. Yet, before AIDS would take him and many visionary
heads away from us, his theatre pieces had been the tunnel which always took
me out of my dead-ends and despairs. His Quotations from a Ruined Cityis the
Dutch, American, Iranian, Bosnian, colonial, slavery, queer, and capitalist history
all in one.
So like him is the figure of Taqi Arani, who I drew in Cambridge while listening
to Richard Rorty’s account of Achieving Our Country, and came across Ali
Mirsepassi’s wonderful history of Arani as the discoverer of Iran, being a
cosmopolitan socialist par excellence.
Last in line of these men, is one woman, who strangely popped up in my mind
time and again these last days. Rosa Luxemburg, whose words on nationalism
lit the way for many, yet her herbariums which she made during her last months
at prison in Berlin silently, tells us more about what a socialist world with flowers
and all beings could be possible, her very trophies were those neglected plants
growing in the stone cracks of prison that we pass by daily in oblivion.
Two hands with no faces are the hand of the statue of liberty and the hand of
Dr Sigmund Freud. I leave out commenting on the statue liberty, but on the very
hands of Freud whose writing might have brought most liberty humans have
ever seen, I like to add that even if he himself never dared to claim so, it was the
beauty in his writings that made our discontent for our civilization, however at
risk, bearable. In the beauty of his words the way to freedom cleared ahead.
One missing portrait is of Adam Phillips, the writer whose insistence on the
importance of beauty has made my thinking possible. He has brought me too
many trophies to my life for me to be able to count, let alone to capture in one
portrait or one page.
Saadi of Shiraz, the poet whose Rose-Garden became the path to ethics through
piercing wit and beauty, was along with Bonnard, Matisse, and their likes, my
inspiration.
I must thank all those who have afforded me more insight into his works, especially
Domenico Ingenito, along with my grandfather and aunt Lily, whose love for Saadi
made me fall in love with him. Saadi is the poet of friendship, he knows too well
friends are the utmost trophies of life, and mine is Titus Nouwens whose listening
and care throughout the grim days of war made me recognize many lines between
my works.
Lih-Lan Wong and Emmelie Koster, despite my disbelief, have continued to support
me through countless crises that an Iranian goes through, without them this show
could have not been concluded the way it has.
The Trophies:
A Declaration of Intent
by Sam Samiee
Acrylic on canvas
30 x 24 cm
Photographer Gert Jan van Rooij
Sentences of Mountains, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 18 cmPhotographer Gert Jan van Rooij
There could hardly be a more urgent time to present this body of work, all created after October 7th, 2023. In a present shaped by repression, rationalisation and alienation from the body, eros and the sacred, Sam Samiee offers a language of poetry, beauty and persistence amid crises.
Having had the privilege of working with Samiee very early on, I can say that few artists have shaped my thinking so profoundly. For decades, his work has insisted on beauty not only as decoration or escape, but as a way of enduring. Across flowers, landscape, portraits, poems, interiors and still lifes, The Trophies gathers works made during war and displacement, where painting becomes a means of remaining human within catastrophe.
Back in 2014, when we were both part of W139 in Amsterdam, Samiee introduced us to a reading of Norman O. Brown’s The Challenge of Islam, in which he proposed that without bringing Islam into our equation, we fail to confront the unknown - an idea we were exploring in a more optimistic time, amid the rapidly changing Warmoesstraat and the persistence of that free haven run by artists. Through Samiee, I came to understand the unknown not only as abstraction or idealisation, but as attention. Samiee has dedicated his practice in relation to so many people, histories, peers, feminism, vulnerability and beauty.
The Masir Curatorial Group invites you to the opening of What’s Your Treasure? onFriday, 17 October 2025, a group exhibition at Kazerouni House, an architectural heritage site in the heart of old Shiraz, presenting artworks by multiple generations of Dutch and Iranian and Polish artists. The exhibition will remain on view until Friday, 24 October 2025. Throughout the week, the curators will engage in conversations with selected artists at Roniyas Hotel. The exhibition has been initiated byReza Keshavarz, produced by Masir Curatorial Group.
To ask What’s your treasure?is a recurring, quiet conversation with yourself when you encounter something that invites your gaze yet resists full understanding.
Art, which always carries a claim to value, naturally provokes this question. A treasure may be an object that holds a secret or a code that delays easy reading. It is not only about glitter or accumulation but about what is cared for—about attention—and therefore, in one way or another, about memory. Treasure lives where desire, value, secrecy, and meaning meet. It is what we choose to keep safe—not only for ourselves but for others. The questionWhat’s your treasure?is what you ask under disastrous conditions, when the earth shakes beneath your feet or war falls from the sky: what do you take with you to safety, what image to behold in memory when an entire history is at stake? To show art made in our times alongside works from another age is to make a new memory of past and present in one frame.
Upon his return to his most beloved city of Shiraz, in a famous qaṣīda, Saadi celebrates his command over language and the arts while humbly exalting the city and its inhabitants as his teachers. He left on his own feet, yet returns head-on; his excitement and anxiety crystallize in a love renewed for the most precious place on earth. By monumentalizing his return, he consolidates Shiraz’s place within language, art, and culture as a treasure for all artists who follow his path. To return with artworks and, in humility, exhibit them within the treasure house of Kazerouni House, whose walls, ceilings, doors, arches, and windows are a symphony of past masters, is to imitate Saadi. As he placed his achievements from other lands beside the treasure of Shiraz, we too bring new works into dialogue with its enduring beauty.
What’s Your Treasure? unfolds inside Kazerouni House, a historic mansion organized around a central courtyard. Traditional Iranian domestic space refined privacy and hospitality into an art: rooms and thresholds nest within each other, opening inward to protect intimacy and outward to honor the guest. The house itself feels like a living chest, a vessel where memories, rituals, and daily life were carefully kept.
Within this heritage, the artworks inhabit richly decorated rooms where certain spaces for display were intentionally preserved by the architect. Works placed in wall niches and in the mirrored hall heighten the silent conversation of comparison—the differing ways art has been made across ages—and naturally lead to the question: what does each of these artworks treasure most?
The structure ofKazerouni Houseshapes both the language and rhythm of this exhibition. Its layered design slows our steps, guides our gaze, and teaches the difference between what is revealed and what is kept private. The geometry of the house functions as a living grid—an architecture of relation between inside and outside, public and private—that echoes the very structure of memory itself.
What’s Your Treasure? engages treasure on more than one level: the house is a treasure of the past; the works each hold something about life; and, above all, the exhibition brings together the diverse ways through which artists of different generations have transformed their experiences into enduring forms. Seeing them in the light of both past and present encourages us to take extra time—to pause and reflect.
Imagining the future means looking beyond the horizon. Where are we now and where do we want to be? WithNew New Babylon, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag creates room for new perspectives. Are grandiose visions still relevant today? From a place of solidarity and care, makers envision the future in a different light.
Breathing and pulsing devices that can replace the human brain, a sea of children’s drawings that connects continents, and greenhouses built on container ships. In New New Babylon: Visions for Another Tomorrow, leading and emerging visual artists, designers, thinkers and activists from around the world share their perspectives. The starting point is a key work in the museum’s collection, the visionary projectNew Babylon(1956-74) in which Constant Nieuwenhuys conceived a society for optimum creativity and the freedom to play. Today’s makers show that his quest is far from over.New New Babylon: Visions for Another Tomorrowshows the power, the beauty and the necessity of radical thought.
New New Babylon features works by
Afra Eisma, Ambassade van de Noordzee, Carlijn Kingma, Davide Allieri, David Jablonowski, Edwin Zwakman, Emma Talbot, Frank Ammerlaan, Gayil Nalls, Harrison Pearce, Hella Jongerius, Jonas Staal, Joshua Serafin, Kinke Kooi, Moshekwa Langa, Oscar Murillo, Pelumi Adejumo, Randa Mirza, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sally von Rosen, Sam Samiee, Steffani Jemison, Tai Shani, The Otolith Group, Werker Collective and Yamuna Forzani & Céline Hurka.
,%202025.%20Acrylic%20paint%20on%20mixed%20media,%20dimensions%20variable.%20Image%20by%20Jonathan%20de%20Waart%20(1).JPG?etag=%2285e520-6a3ba572%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=373%2B560&quality=85 "Reclining Nude, painted couch by Sam Samiee, at Cobra Museum for Modern Art")
Wolvecamp 100 X Sam Samiee, curated by Sam Samiee at Cobra Museum for Modern Art, 21 March 2025 to 15 June 2025, Amstelveen
To mark the 100th anniversary of Theo Wolvecamp’s birth, Museum Cobra presents a festive exhibition linking the work of this influential but modest Cobra artist with that of Iranian-Dutch artist and guest curator Sam Samiee.
Theo Wolvecamp (Hengelo 1925 – Amsterdam 1992) is often described as an artist who deliberately kept to the sidelines. Unlike his Cobra colleagues, he worked outside the spotlight and stayed true to his own path, far away from the noise of publicity. Yet he was a driving force within the movement. Wolvecamp devoted his life to one of Cobra’s core principles: free, spontaneous painting in which improvisation and experimentation play the leading role. His work was always sincere, free of external appearances, and found its strength in the intuition and spontaneity with which it was created.
What makes Wolvecamp unique is the combination of the mythical and the material. He saw paint not just as a tool, but as a living material with which he brought his own world to life. He admired artists such as Asger Jorn, who he felt perfectly captured this balance between content and form. Miró and Alechinsky were also great sources of inspiration, but Wolvecamp’s work continues to unmistakably carry his own voice: raw, spontaneous and sensitive.
Sam Samiee, winner of the 2018 Wolvecamp Prize, sees Wolvecamp as an important source of inspiration. Like his predecessor, he approaches painting as a free, experimental process, but he also brings in new perspectives. In his work, European painting traditions merge with Persian cultural references, and he explores the boundaries of the medium by expanding painting into installations and spatial interventions.
His expressive use of color, dynamic brushwork and layered textures create an experience that is both sensory and intellectually stimulating. In doing so, like Wolvecamp, he seeks a balance between spontaneous creation and deeper layers of content. In this exhibition, Samiee links not only the heritage of Cobra to contemporary art, but also to broader cultural connections, such as the influence of Iranian artists on Western art history and the narrative nature of One Thousand and One Nights.
.jpg?etag=%22602d8-68aabcbd%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Modernde Kunst")
.jpg?etag=%2257c1b-68aabcb1%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst")
.jpg?etag=%22549d6-68aabcb2%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Installation view of Wolvecamp 100 X Sam Samiee, Cobra Museum, 2025. I")
.jpg?etag=%226f7bf-68aabcb3%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Installation view of Wolvecamp 100 X Sam Samiee, Cobra Museum, 2025. I")
.jpg?etag=%2238a9c-68aabcb4%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst")
.jpg?etag=%2269262-68aabcb7%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst Abstract")
.jpg?etag=%228ecf4-68aabcb9%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst Madonna Lilies")
.jpg?etag=%225bc5e-68aabcba%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst")
.jpg?etag=%225d845-68aabcbb%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst")
.jpg?etag=%2270433-68aabcbc%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Wolvecamp Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst")
.%20Acrylic%20on%20fabric.%20Image%20by%20Gert-Jan%20van%20Rooij(1).jpg?etag=%2276c67-68aabcbe%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee, couch, Cobra Museum Wolvecamp")
.%20Acrylic%20on%20fabric.%20Image%20by%20Gert-Jan%20van%20Rooij(1).jpg?etag=%22aeea8-68aabcbf%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "Sam Samiee, couch, Cobra Museum Wolvecamp")
.jpg?etag=%228ecf4-68aabcb9%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=835%2B612&quality=85 "left: Madonna Lilies, oil on canvas, by Sam Samiee, right: Theo Wolvecamp at Cobra Museum for Modern Art")
.jpg?etag=%22a0978e-67a78c8d%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=519%2B778&extract=106%2B148%2B318%2B382&quality=85 "On October 10th, I realized, How Beautiful You Are, by Sam Samiee, at the Third Line Gallery, acrylic on canvas")
Neither Here, Nor Elsewhere, curated by Sanaz Askari at The Third Line Gallery, 14 December 2024 to 26 January 2025, Dubai
The Third Line is pleased to announce Neither Here ~ Nor Else where a group exhibition curated by Sanaz Askari. The exhibition brings together a diverse collective of artists from across Africa and Asia. Selected artists include Faissal El-Malak, Hayv Kahraman, Mahsa Merci, Michael Ho, Omar Mismar, Sam Samiee, Sophia Al-Maria, Soufiane Ababri, Tahmineh Monzavi, and Yumna Al-Arashi, all of whom convey narratives of identity, desire, displacement, and resistance in response to prevailing cultural and political conditions shaped by migration, censorship, and societal marginalisation.
The exhibition centres on the tension between fear and fantasy, the public and the private, as experienced by marginalised bodies existing within distinct socio-political frameworks. The artists challenge social hierarchies and restrictions that limit the spaces they inhabit, pushing back against the forces that constrain their identities while revealing inner desires, embracing fluidity, and exploring the fragmentation of preconceived settings. Through a reimagining of the corporeal in relation to its surroundings, their explorations reveal transformative possibilities for existence.
The works span a range of disciplines, including photography, video art, and works on paper and canvas, exploring mechanisms of control—such as social norms, gender standards, and moral codes—highlighting their pervasive influence and questioning their legitimacy.
Sam Samiee’s portraits challenge the hegemony of Western figuration by harnessing agency to depict young men from Eastern Islamicate nations in intimate, staged moments. Drawing on the calligraphic style of Nastaliq, the series reclaims the beauty and complexity of male figures beyond Western standards, confronting distorted historical narratives and inviting a fresh, humanising gaze.
.jpg?etag=%2210246f2-67a78c2a%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=907%2B605&quality=85 "L: Nastaliq Might be an Indian Boy, acrylic on canvas, R: Nastaliq Might be A Mazani Boy, by Sam Samiee, Third Line Gallery")
True Colors, AkzoNobel Art Foundation at Kunstmuseum, 31 May to 29 September 2024, The Hague
The AkzoNobel Art Foundation has been an important player in the art world for almost thirty years. The foundation supports talented young artists as well as established artists with commissions and acquisitions. These artworks literally bring color to the daily lives of employees and guests at the offices of the Dutch paints and coatings manufacturer. Eight years ago, the Art Foundation opened an art space at its headquarters in Amsterdam that is accessible to the public free of charge. Works from the art collection are regularly on loan in museums in the Netherlands and abroad, though the this is the first time that the art collection is the main focus of a museum show.
Color in all its facets is one of the key elements of both the AkzoNobel Art Foundation’s collection policy and this exhibition, alongside the subjects of space, the individual and society.True Colors features work by more than sixty artists worldwide, whose work addresses these subjects. Work from the AkzoNobel Art Foundation by Steven Aalders, Yael Bartana, Ann Veronica Janssens, Emma Talbot, Alan Uglow, Marthe Wéry and others will enter into a dialogue with work from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s collection, by Donald Judd, Sarah Lucas, Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Charley Toorop and others. Color makes for interesting combinations. Works by herman de vries and Pieter Paul Pothoven (AkzoNobel Art Foundation), that explore color and pigments, share a space with the work of Isa Genzken (Kunstmuseum Den Haag), who uses a highly industrial palette.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, simplicity of form, exploration and complexity of color scheme highlights painter Steven Aalders’ (AkzoNobel Art Foundation) kinship with predecessors like Piet Mondrian and Donald Judd (Kunstmuseum Den Haag).
Artists often flawlessly know how to identify and depict our vulnerabilities, portraying who we are and where we are, both as a society and as individual. An important pillar in the collection of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation and in that of the Kunstmuseum is 'la condition humaine'; the essence of being human, and the quest for identity.True Colorswill therefore unfold to reveal a rich variety of images and stories that cast a sharp eye over today’s turbulent world. Otobong Nkanga, for example, uses a poetic visual language as a plea against the exploitation of the earth. And Femmy Otten and Buhlebezwe Siwani reveal the essence of humanity in all its strength and fragility.
True Colors - AkzoNobel Art Foundation at Kunstmuseum Den Haag promises an exciting mix of work from different generations and disciplines. Young international talents stand side by side with renowned artists, in complementary combinations, telling a powerful and colorful story, both literally and metaphorically. A narrative deeply rooted in art history while resonating with the pulse of contemporary society.
Listen to Springvossen 18 juni | Sam Samiee
Sam Samiee, painter, interviewed by Robert van Altena.
In this episode Robert van Altena interviews Sam Samiee about his work, the meeting of different traditions and understanding the world, or trying to do so, through poetry. As point of departure of their conversation they have chosen two of his works that are presently included in two separate exhibitions.
AmsterdamFM·Springvossen 528 Sam Samiee
Afternoon: Homage to Monet’s waterlilies offended by the Teheran Mountains (2013), is on show in Earth the current collection presentation at the AkzoNobel Art Foundation in Amsterdam. The painterly installation ‘The Sky River & A Piece of the Sky’ (2015)), is part of True Colors in Kunstmuseum Den Haag (up until the 29th of september).
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.
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.
FOCUS with artists Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Sam Samiee
A Garden of Clouds, Kunstinstituut Melly, curated by Vivian Ziherl, 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 the Garden of Clouds is 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 alongside Rotterdam 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.
.jpg?etag=%2257d0b1-6a3bfbf6%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=386%2B307&extract=0%2B0%2B386%2B307&quality=85)
The Sites of Ruin, Group Exhibition, 12 Gates, Philadelphia, 2022
Sites of Ruin unmoors the site of imperial violence from its fixed location in time and space. This multidisciplinary showexpounds forms of queer resistance to the physical and cultural violence of occupation, war, and patriarchy. Working in installation, painting, photography, video, and sculpture, the artists create with urgency; their works demand a witness to the rituals of creation at the site of so-called ruin– the intimate and the meditative, the rageful and the joyous. Sites of Ruin shatters the static facade of the site, presenting instead ruins that breathe, transform, and resonate globally, with encroaching familiarity.
Love and pleasure persist in ruin. Ahmad Qais Munhazim’s photographs depict queer love, joy and friendships amidst the ruins of American warfare in Afganistan. The irrevocably global landscape grounds portraits of the artist’s friends and chosen family, who pose with flowers from his father’s once-bombed garden that still blooms. Sam Samiee’s portraits drape homoerotic nude figures along the traditional curves of Perso-Arabic script. His boldly pigmented bodies invoke Matisse, and pose at times in front of ornate handicraft, or in empty rooms. A delicate balance of indigenous and imperial references, Samiee contemplates the multidirectional tensions of Western masculinity on Queer Persian existence. Queer intimacy is not a luxury but a necessity; it takes root and thrives, regardless of its environs.
Violence, too, endures. Tsohil Bhatia’s video installation follows a photo of the artist being edited for a U.S. visa application, we watch as their wounds are erased from their face, modifying their image to adhere to the dehumanizing protocol of petitioning for migration. Noormah Jamal’s sculptures weigh the legacy of her people against their subjugation and misrepresentation. Noormah’s ceramic busts and heads bloom from flowers. Roses bud from the eyes and mouth, a symbol she associates with loss. Jamal visualizes the emotions behind stories that are repeatedly ignored or silenced, conjuring them into existence.
From Munhazim’s American-Afghan warscape, to Samiee’s rooms that are ambiguously here and there, or Jamal’s sculptures that grow from a space of constant mourning, the artists extricate the site from its physical location, exploring it instead as a transoceanic space and sensibility. Without the sterile casing of a memorial or museum that imperial power affords, they avow that ruin, like power, is transitive and dynamic. The site of ruin is inextricable from the life around it, and those who cause it.
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.
A Bit of Unruly Complexity, Group Exhibition curated by Misal Adnan
Yıldız, Sanatorium, September - November 2022, Istanbul
This exhibition is dedicated to what science brings to our lives ascomplexity considering our interpretations of nature with our perception of reality and cognitive limits. A BIT OF UNRULY COMPLEXITY ishungry for emotional intelligence, genuine connections, visual poetry,and painting. In the age of ‘complicated’ relationships, it proposes acknowledging, recognizing, and understanding various forms of ‘complexity’ -specifically the notion of complexity- within the contingentnature of things or events.Either a human being with developmentalissues and social dilemmas; or a ‘machine’ with its parts; individuals,societies, and communities; or our universe with its unimaginablescale are examples of “the complex’’ in their full meanings.
As an exhibition, it consistently magnets specific artistic perspectivesthat reflect on complexities, which emerge from interconnectedness,ecological regularities, and geo-centered subjects through engagingwith critical forms, which connect us around/against this question -orproblem of (Western) humanism/subjectivism. As an ironic gesture forits mission-impossible, the phrase added for the title, “-a bit” criticallyasks some space for the local context, experimental approach as wellas contextual thinking regarding the limits of any exhibition space,calendar, or budget.
The making of the exhibition, research materials, and curatorial textwith all its further notes will be included in the December 2022 issueof the publication “xx-yy-magazine” led by Sergen Şehitoğlu.
In this booklet, we share the artists’ answers to our questions aimingto make their voices more present, and their statements more clearduring your visit.
Art is complex, as life, and science, and needs your attention, connection, and care.
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. What makes 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 is one 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 which we, the witness, can rest ever so briefly. From there experience the artworks - positioned sometimes separate, sometimes complimentary, sometimes overlapping - the way we experience a dream. Rationality would never be enough to explain such phenomena. And this is key.And so we continue our journey through the space, towards another late guest at this exhibition: Pier Paolo Pasolini, who perfected the walk of the rational-emotional tightrope: a gay marxist fascinated with historical 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 ,the likes of Pasolini showed us how to fully embrace these worlds without surrendering the rational one - often at the cost of their lives. We are reminded to go above and beyond clichés and identity politics.
“Here Comes Everybody” serves as a memorial of all those who cannot be here - whose lives were interrupted by the hostile conditions that forbade history from ripening. We get a sense of how much more there is 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)
.jpg?etag=%2211eadb-65417663%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=710%2B984&extract=120%2B151%2B480%2B808&quality=85)
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 the tragedy 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 colours scraped 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 of Samiee’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 vast number of rigid frames.This lesson is one that Samiee wishes to impart upon his return home: embrace uncertainty. Cherish it 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 with our 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 as an external phenomenon, or as something that not only has the potential of emerging from our minds, but from our very bodies, turned to dust? After all, what are we but soil, blushing, after a spring shower? We are escorted out by two promethean allegories: the Greek Titan, supreme trickster and contemporary symbol for the industrial, mechanic, phallic energy, has broken his chains. The world around 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, the pilgrim blushes with shame at the humbleness of his mementoes. For all the weight he has carried home, his gift is but a promise: like a visitor to a garden, intoxicated by his journey, he cannot bring flowers. 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.
.jpg?etag=%221e599a-65417670%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%22260623-6541769a%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%2227afaa-6541768e%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%221c2d14-65417650%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%2225e2d7-65417693%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%221c3309-6541765b%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%2226d74a-65417682%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%221e8bb1-6541766a%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%2227adc8-65417689%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "1399. 2020. Sam Samiee. Blush of the Soil. Dastan+2. Installation View")
.jpg?etag=%22122fd9-6541767b%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=832%2B1059&quality=85 "painting installation by Sam Samiee, The Scent of Dawn, نفحات صبح 2020, acrylic on canvas")
.jpg?etag=%2212737f-6541765f%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=800%2B1082&extract=163%2B231%2B480%2B851&quality=85)
.jpg?etag=%22156b60-65417676%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=935%2B1100&quality=85)
40 year Anniversary of W139, Three Awkward Handlings of Phallocentric Promises,
2019, W139, Amsterdam
In conversations with the team behind the initiative, Samiee identified a repeating pattern in three different artworks made in different eras and locations. The resulting mural Three Awkward Handlings of the Phallocentric Promises acts as a storyboard where these three paintings are reworked together on a background formed from the unapologetically simple use of spray paint. Colorful, interwoven lines are a suggestion toward the overlooked territory of art: the decorative and the chromatic, with their reliance on rhythm and the avoidance of a phallocentric signifier. The figures in the painting are the re-created female protagonists of each of the three works of art, two Persian miniatures and a painting by Pierre Klossowki.
Samiee’s mural highlights the awkward gesture in the female or female-looking bodies repeated in handling one of three phallocentric symbols: the divine, the patriarchal and the industrial. Three Awkward Handlings looks at the handling of a maquette-like city by the archangel Gabriel; the handling of a picture of Khosrow II, a pre-Islamic Persian emperor, whose portrait is presented in proposal to the Armenian princess Shirin; and Roberte’s handling of the rape of the industrial monster in Pierre Klossowki’s The Recuperation of Surplus Value. The divine, patriarchal and industrial covenants are self-evident in the symbols and titles of these historic paintings. It is no coincidence that the gestures of the three figures correspond to the position they are situated in.
.jpg?etag=%222138f6-654160ed%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=377%2B566&quality=85)
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 poetry 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.
.jpg?etag=%2227f0b7-654160fa%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%221d7543-654160d2%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%221eb444-654160ce%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%22212fa5-654160d6%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%2226e9cb-654160d8%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%222f7a46-654160e5%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%222731fa-654160ea%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
.jpg?etag=%222a77d9-654160fe%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=2500,1667&quality=85 "The Spark is You - The Parasol unit foundation - Sam Samiee")
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
.jpg?etag=%2226e9cb-654160d8%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=377%2B566&quality=85)
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 from One Thousand and One Nights.
He asks the question: ‘What would Shahrzad inOne Thousand and One Nights do 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’.
%202.jpg?etag=%22483c7c-65416c00%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=780%2B520&quality=85)
.jpg?etag=%2224ab89-654160e1%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=780%2B1170&quality=85)
.jpg?etag=%2229db01-654160db%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=585%2B878&quality=85)
.jpg?etag=%222be503-654160f1%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=1822%2B1215&quality=85)
Modes of Being: Ideologies and Space as Malleable EntitiesDay 1 Evening Discussion
Following their talks, performances and a screening, presenters in this session discussed “how creative foresight can transcend rigid ideological dictums and hegemonic codes into malleable material for consciousness, nourishment, and longevity.”
The conversation was moderated byCraig Yee and Leeza Ahmady around artist and curator Sam Samiee’s preoccupation with psychoanalysis, Manichaeism, and the Persian code of conduct, Adab; Burçak Bingöl’s reflections on how the Chinese porcelain trade via the Silk Road influenced the evolution of the highly distinctive Turkish Ottoman Court style; Chongbin Zheng’s recent interventions within the spaces of several historic gardens exploring both the cultural and natural modes of being in the world;ST Luk’s introduction of the late artistic duo, Arakawa & Madeline Gins’s death-defying architectural projects, namely their visionary “Reversible Destiny Lofts” in Mitaka, Japan, which has challenged the bounds of space not simply as a source of enlightenment but also as a means for a longer life; and Arahmaiani Feisal’s performance: “Manifesto of the Sceptic” proclaiming artists as “alchemical vessels” for change as exemplified by her long-term collaboration with Tibetan monks (and local Chinese authorities), resulting in the planting of nearly one million trees across the country.
FIELD MEETING is a series of art forums pioneering new curatorial formats that merge performance, lecture, contemplation, discourse, and travel—creating immersive, cross-cultural encounters where artists, curators, thinkers, and spiritual practitioners engage in deep exchange and transformative collective experience. Organized as multi-day performative gatherings and hosted by leading institutions including Asia Society Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, each edition experiments with expansive ways of foregrounding the intangible, fluid, and often unseen dimensions of contemporary art.
It reimagines curation as a site of generative thought, where the boundaries between creator and audience dissolve. It privileges process and conceptual exploration over finished outcomes, inviting play as a vital thread woven through the creative journey. This approach cultivates a community rooted in mutual inspiration while resourcefully addressing challenges in exhibition-making, fundraising, education, research, and representation. It fosters collaboration between cultural leaders in the United States and Asia—initiatives that extend far beyond the creation and exhibition of art, aligning with what lies at the heart of artistic practice: experimentation, transformation, and consciousness.
FIELD MEETING | Take 6
January 25, 2019 | Hosted at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Adab: Collecting within Chaos
“The painter’s attention was collected in the reflection of her beauty, As he reached the hair flock, at last, he painted chaos.”
– King Mohammad Dara Shokuh
The artist’s research into psychoanalysis, Manichaeism, and the Persian code of conduct, Adab. He collects, reconstructs, and resignifies epistemic frames of mind for navigation through time and space. Samiee claims that psychoanalysis, a climate of ideas rooted in psychology, is the only robust Neoplatonist discourse in the Western world. Manichaeism, a lost religion made up of a shared history stretching from Britain to Southeast China, is the origin of much of Sufi and mystic literature and art, while the Adab is a modus operandi that collects through the negation and negotiation of the aesthetic-ethical plane. Such produced prehistory is a framework through which both Samiee’s painting and curatorial practice may be contextualized.
Casino Copernicus, Solo exhibition at Fons Welters Galerie, 2019, Amsterdam
Galerie Fons Welters presents Casino Copernicus, a solo exhibition by Sam Samiee in the front space of the gallery. Samiee is a former Rijksakademie resident. His practice builds on two important pillars: painting and research. The combinations and references made by the artists in his installations filled with paintings and sculptural
elements relate to – but are not limited by – Persian literature, psychoanalysis, Western art history and philosophy.
For the development of the works on view in Casino Copernicus two texts have been important to Samiee: The Unfinished Copernican Revolution by French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and The Black Sun by Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Samiee compares the practice of an artist/painter to the act of gambling; every stroke, decision or step in the work could bring you a step forward, but it could also set you back. A pursuit which at the same time has a nearly unattainable goal. The books attend to Samiee’s interest in the way the people we like or are afraid of form the centre of our thoughts and actions. His installations often evoke a sense of disorientation, inspiring the viewer to re-relate them self to the space and time. Samiee invites us to actively participate in the birth of new, more interrelated worlds.
Sam Samiee (1988, IRN) lives and works in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tehran. He studied painting and industrial design at the Art University in Tehran; AKI Art and Design at ArtEZ, Enschede and was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam during 2014-2015. Recently Samiee had a solo show at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague and his work was part of the 10th Berlin Biennale. He won the Wolcevamp Prijs 2018 and in 2016 he was awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting in the Netherlands. In 2016 he exhibited in the group show Baroque at Galerie Fons Welters. His work is held in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague and AKZO NOBEL as well as various private collections.
.jpg?etag=%22c3792-6a40f0f1%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=595%2B692&quality=85 "Sam Samiee Roulette, 2018 Acrylic on canvas 140 x 120 cm")
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 from the ninthvcentury invention of Farsi to how this coincided with the emergence of painting in the West as a technique to negotiate metaphysics, and then to contemporary psychoanalysis, culminating in possible answers to the question of why Germans still haven’t learned to mourn properly. 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 is not to say they are the same. He is well aware of when to apply which mode of communication. His installations, often composed of paintings and objects, break open the normative order and iconography of traditional European painting. Samiee synthesizes this history with one of his recent 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 enter into or create new spaces and temporalities, beginning on the canvas and usually extending into the three-dimensional exhibition space with the support of objects as a means of challenging hegemonic visual practices. This approach is always driven by a desire to deflect the conditioned gaze of viewers and witnesses from conventional interpretations or processes of meaning-making towards new fields of possibility; a procedure 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 The Bedroom Posters (2015-16) depict the queering of (male-ascribed) physiques or disproportionately painted celestial constellations 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 character; Samiee’s installations prompt viewers to physically situate themselves in space and attune themselves to the atmosphere. One can read this as a call to temporarily accept disturbing environments, unknown and unfamiliar, which ultimately invite us to actively participate in the birthing of new, more interrelated worlds. Leading up to the 10th Berlin Biennale, Samiee continued his explorations of the idea of adab during a two-month studio residency at the ZK/U-Center forArt and Urbanistics, where his work The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (2018) is on view. – Magnus Elias Rosengarten
.jpg?etag=%22558349-660d2c02%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=540%2B810&quality=85)
The Painted Bird: Dreams and Nightmares of Europe, Marres House for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, 2017
What is the real bridge between Europe and its neighbors?” Tangible objects or untold, unknown stories? Within a group show addressing the Dreams and Nightmares of Europe, “Europe in 2017 … on the verge of despair,” Samiee drew inspiration from Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.” In this short story, Borges sketches a portrait in which Spanish Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) finds a home in the imagination and works of Dutch philosopher Siger of Brabant (Zeger Van Brabandt). Engaging two performers in visualizing this imaginary fraternity — two philosophers who had never met, and yet their imagined kinship changed the future of Europe and the world — the painting was an outcome of the United Painting project directed by Gijs Frieling.
A Camp, a group exhibition curated by Sam Samiee, Dastan's Basement, Tehran, 2017
You can’t always say what’s going on in your mind, what you’re feeling. Maybe you say, “No! Not this! No, not that either!” But you just can’t utter exactly what you mean. Or maybe you do taarof, or you are compelled to show taarof. But maybe with a coquettish glance, with some blandishment, some sign, you might do something that the penny would drop for the other.
If these are the shoes you fill, and other media don’t bring you satisfaction, with a few years of this routine you will become an expert. You won't speak, you also won't show. Sometimes you act stubbornly, other times you pitch a tent over the words that you have in mind, body and heart and you set up camp. You set up camp and that one point you have in your mind you peg to the ground. After some time, the weight of your foot is unnecessary; you stay around until you, your point, the air, the trees would all get used to your type and you might become part of the scene. But still they won't know what enterprise you have in mind.
These words weren’t said by Susan Sontag. They also aren’t my words. In fact a large number of silent poets of diverse delicacies, not out of a need to prove their existence, have made a signifier visible that observers might ask, what is on your mind? Or even if these observers don’t come forward and nothing is said, at least they would get used to the sight and site of this camp and tent and settlement and fire.
Oscar Wilde, peace be upon him, couldn’t say what he wanted to say. But for sure he knew that he could not say it. But he said other things such that when a reader reads, if of a similar shade of heart, one could carry some doubt. If one can bear that same doubt through ups and downs — not that it is enough, but what can be done — sometimes that doubt is the only thing that one can offer to the world so that those of the same shade might find it someday, might open up, hear and yet promise not to enunciate the secret.
Other times it’s not unsayable, but saying it also won’t help. One should be there and spend time with that temper, but who has the time these days? We already appreciate very much that you took the pains to bear the march to our camp.
Welcome to our camp. We sometimes set up camp on the Island of Hormoz, but before that we were training in the field of the University of Art. It was a wellspring of sensibility and still is that one-by-one we have learned from each other. It hasn’t become our child, so much as we have become its child. In the Persianate arena of imagination and thought, theorisations of the poesis of visual arts don’t get anywhere. So, as the great Balthus said, “Let’s look at the paintings.”
--
From Susan Sontag, “Notes On ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation, (London: Penguin UK, 2009), 275-292. Essay originally published in 1964 in the Partisan Review.
- Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.
- Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist’s involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy.
- Style is everything. Genet’s ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet’s statement that “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde’s “in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.” But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windemere’s Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp.
همیشه نمیتوانی بگویی در ذهنت چه میگذرد، یا چه حسی داری. ممکن است بگویی نه! این نه! نه، این هم نه! اما نتوانی بیان کنی دقیقاً منظورت چیست. یا شاید تعارف داری، یا باید تعارف داشته باشی. ولی شاید بتوانی با کرشمهای با غمزهای با اشارهای کاری کنی دوزاری طرف بیافتد.
اگر اینکاره باشی، و ابزارهای بیانی دیگر هم چندان دلخوشت نکنند، چند سالی که به این منوال بگذرانی دیگر خبره میشوی. نمیگویی، نشان هم نمیدهی، بعضی وقتها لجاجت میکنی، بعضی وقتها هم میروی چادر میزنی سر حرفی که در ذهن و تن و قلب داری و اطراق میکنی. اطراق میکنی و بر آن یک نکته که در ذهن داری پافشاری میکنی. بعد از مدتی به فشار پا هم نیاز نیست، همان حوالی آنقدر میمانی تا تو و منظور و هوا و درختان همه به گونهات عادت کنند و بشوی جزئی از صحنه. اما نمیدانند سودای آنچه در سر داری.
اینها را سوزان سانتاگ نگفته. اینها را من هم نمیگویم. تقریباً عدهی کثیری از شاعران ساکت به لطایفالحیل گوناگون، بودن خویش را اینگونه نه که ثابت کرده باشند، که اشاره را قابلدیدن کردهاند تا یا ناظران بگویند خب پس چه در سر داری یا حتی اگر هیچی نمیگویند و جلو نمیآیند به این کمپ و چادر و اطراق و آتش عادت کنند.
اسکار وایلدِ خدا بیامرز نتوانست بگوید آنچه میخواست بگوید. اما میدانست که حتماً نمیتواند بگوید. ولی چیزهای دیگری گفت که تا خواننده بخواند اگر اهل دل باشد شکش میبرد. همان شک را که با خود حمل کند از خم و چم روزگار، نه که کافیست، اما چه میشود کرد، بعضاً همان حساسیت تنها چیزی است که میتوان به جهان عرضه کرد تا اهل نظر بیابند روزی و بشکافند و بشنوند و قول بدهند که سر اسرار نگشایند.
بعضی وقتها هم ناگفتنی نیست، اما گفتنش هم کمکی نمیکند، باید باشی و با آن منش نشست و برخاست کنی. اما امروزه کی وقت دارد؟ همین که قدمرنجه فرمودید به کمپ چندروزهی ما در اینجا ممنونیم.
به کمپ ما خوش آمدید. بعضیوقتها در جزیرهی هرمز بهپایش میکنیم، اما پیش از این در چمن دانشگاه هنر مشقش میکردیم. چشمهای از حساسیتی بوده و هست که یکبهیک از هریک یادش گرفتهایم و بچهمان نشده ولی ما بچهاش شدهایم.
در ساحت تخیل و تفکر فارسیزبانان تئوریزهکردن شاعرانگیِ هنرِ تجسمی کار به جایی نمیبرد. پس همانطور که بالتوس بزرگ گفت: بیایید به نقاشیها نگاه کنیم.
Royal Dutch Award for Modern Painting,
2016, Dam Paleis, Amsterdam
ln our society as well as in art, symbols play an important role. Samiee questions those symbols in his paintings. Furthermore, he provides an alternative for a eurocentric outlook on the world. The Persian literary-humanistic perspective is evoked, not as a replacement, but as an addition to the visual humanism of Dutch art. And thus he firmly takes a stance in the storm of symbols, opinions, identities, and memories that confuses our world today. His work shows an artist who is able to question boundaries in a restrained manner. The decorative power that sometimes brushes the edges of kitsch the themes that alternate from the heavy-going to more light-hearted perspectives, show us an artist who ably manipulates multiple registers.
Baroque, Group exhibition curated by Laurie Cluitmans, Fons Welters Galerie, 2016, Amsterdam
For this exhibition, Sam Samiee created an immersive, painterly installation that, through a playful ornamentation, incorporates video works by Taus Makhacheva and Kareem Lotfy. Samiee does not shy away from the ornamental. His so-called iPad drawings, for example, drawn with a simple application, are photocopied and multiplied to form ornamental framings. Within the context of his total installations, these patterns move beyond the decorative and reveal a fragmented autonomy.
One would usually associate Baroque with the late-sixteenth and seventeenth century style in European art. Grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, movement and tension would be its ingredients to evoke emotional states, appealing to the senses. The three young artists in this exhibition, each in their own manner, reflect on ornamental motives and symbols in order to tell another, perhaps more unknown story, cross-referencing influences over time and geographies. Should we read these motives as aesthetics or as discourse?
.jpg?etag=%22209cd9-6a5b5348%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=935%2B623&quality=85)
.jpg?etag=%225b243-6a5b52fb%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=461%2B635&quality=85)
Bedroom Posters, site-specific installation, RijksakademieOpen 2015, Amsterdam
Rather than being merely a collection of paintings and objects, Samiee’s installation ought to be regarded as a single painting. The topology of the spatialized universe of the artist's painted surface is a unitary atmosphere — one which is not simply constructed from a set of integrated colours and shapes but which also proposes an original concept of culture, a proposition that constitutes the core of his practice. Samiee’s work is the synthesis of the history of Western painting and the artist’s focused research on Persian adab, a word which in Persian stands for the double concepts of ethics and aesthetics. Samiee has been meticulously constructing a theoretical prehistory for his painting practice out of the Persian literary legacy of the past millennium as it relates to the core concepts of contemporary psychoanalysis. To navigate the space of Samiee’s painting, the viewer is obliged to break away from contemporary art’s reliance on a singular lens, be it the history of avant-garde, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, or social and political issues and instead combine them to arrive at the implications of the work. From a purely pictorial point of view, Samiee’s return to the 9th century and the founding of Persian in 700 CE coincides with the emergence of painting as a crucial technology for the communication of metaphysics in the West. Thus Samiee’s break from the tradition of flat painting is a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. By breaking away from the flat geometry as the link between the actual and virtual in painting, the artist reconstructs a new heterodimensional space out of the possibilities offered by the gallery, proposing a new existential role for the future of painting as the visual and experiential dimension of thought.”
