© 2022 Faisal Samra
Long considered one of the Arab Gulf’s foremost artists and a pioneer of conceptual art in the Middle East, Bahraini-born, Saudi national Faisal Samra incorporates digital photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance in a creative repertoire that explores existentialist themes with the figure at its centre. Since the mid 1970s, Samra has tested the prescribed functions of media through meticulously structured works with experimentation and research as the guiding principles of his artistic practice. As his oeuvre has progressed and defied conventional modes of representation, he has rebelled against his own understanding of art, transitioning into new works that maintain what he identifies as essential concepts: spontaneity, dynamism, and secrecy.
In 1974, Samra emigrated from Saudi Arabia to France to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), Paris. While studying at the esteemed institution, he immersed himself in the work of modern and contemporary European artists. This initial period of Samra’s development was distinguished by expressionist drawings and paintings that investigate the body in motion or at rest, establishing a conceptual basis for his later videos, photographs, and installations, while also demonstrating his initial rejection of the traditional forms of figuration.
Upon graduating from the ENSBA in 1980, Samra settled in Saudi Arabia and continued to exhibit abroad. In the late 1980s he returned to France, where he spent four years at the Institute du Monde Arabe as an arts consultant. After nearly a decade of contributing to collective exhibitions across Europe, he held his first solo show at Etienne Dinet Gallery in Paris (1989). This milestone was followed by Le Pli (1991), a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Institute du Monde Arabe that established Samra as a leading artist from the Arab world. This period of his career was distinguished by early investigations of emotive and sensory approaches to art.
In the 1990s, Samra’s Heads and Other Body series introduced hanging art objects that blur the lines between painting and sculpture by liberating the treated canvas from the stretcher or frame, and incorporating materials such as wire mesh, which create an armature for three-dimensional forms. This enabled Samra to explore the dynamics of an artwork as it is experienced in a particular setting while presenting constructive materials as its form and content. These formal and conceptual breakthroughs led to influential installation, video, and multimedia works that continued his career-long investigation of life, the space between birth and death, and how time can be reflected through the visual devices of art.
Maymanah Farhat
Art critic based in New York, USA
Faisal Samra, from the veil to the unveiling
Fusion is characteristic of Faisal Samra’s work. On one part, a cultural amalgam for this Bahrain-born Saudi who studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. This sense of mixture can also found in the media that he utilises, beginning his career with drawings and paintings before delving into performance and video.
By 1989, the artist used primitive and poor materials such as bamboo, threads, or goatskin, focusing on both materials and sensations. Soon after, the fold interferes in his work with the straight line of Deleuze, and as a measure and materialisation of time but also evoking a sense of the most baroque drapery. The fold alludes to a more important metaphor in the Distorted Reality series, initiated in 2005. It's all a game of contrasts that these photos, taken in the context of performance, put into play, ranging from masks and bandages, to pain and camouflage, opacity and transparency. The identity of the artist cracks, vanishes and hybridises itself. Just like in the theatre, everyone wears a mask and holds his or her truths. The artist appears in gnarled postures, like a cilice or camisole.
Swaddled, contorted, the character is constrained in his actions until asphyxia. Is this a clash of cultures? Is it difficult to find a place in this fusion sometimes heavy to bear? Is it about avoiding being seen or seeing? The questions like the answers are varied. “The characters are rebelling against temporality, and trying, out of frustration to counter the media image that controls and veils them. Also, it shows how our visual field is loaded and invaded with images”, says Faisal Samra. “The man becomes a warrior who has no arms, a Don Quixote. His defence is to remove himself from the image rather than adding a layer.” Is it a revolt? Without a doubt, since for Samra, it is a source of renewal. But his way of waging war is more defensive than offensive. Such denunciation imposes itself in dots, between indication and incision rather than in a slogan. As the artist is wary of univocal readings of the world, nothing can be summarised in a single face. This distorted uneven reality also takes its full meaning from the context of rapid urbanisation in the Middle East, where everything suddenly seems artificial, but also the lack of transparency in our political and economical system where things are disordered, without it managing to disentangle itself.
Roxana Azimi
Long considered one of the Arab Gulf’s foremost artists and a pioneer of conceptual art in the Middle East, Bahraini-born, Saudi national Faisal Samra incorporates digital photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance in a creative repertoire that explores existentialist themes with the figure at its centre. Since the mid 1970s, Samra has tested the prescribed functions of media through meticulously structured works with experimentation and research as the guiding principles of his artistic practice. As his oeuvre has progressed and defied conventional modes of representation, he has rebelled against his own understanding of art, transitioning into new works that maintain what he identifies as essential concepts: spontaneity, dynamism, and secrecy.
In 1974, Samra emigrated from Saudi Arabia to France to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), Paris. While studying at the esteemed institution, he immersed himself in the work of modern and contemporary European artists. This initial period of Samra’s development was distinguished by expressionist drawings and paintings that investigate the body in motion or at rest, establishing a conceptual basis for his later videos, photographs, and installations, while also demonstrating his initial rejection of the traditional forms of figuration.
Upon graduating from the ENSBA in 1980, Samra settled in Saudi Arabia and continued to exhibit abroad. In the late 1980s he returned to France, where he spent four years at the Institute du Monde Arabe as an arts consultant. After nearly a decade of contributing to collective exhibitions across Europe, he held his first solo show at Etienne Dinet Gallery in Paris (1989). This milestone was followed by Le Pli (1991), a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Institute du Monde Arabe that established Samra as a leading artist from the Arab world. This period of his career was distinguished by early investigations of emotive and sensory approaches to art.
In the 1990s, Samra’s Heads and Other Body series introduced hanging art objects that blur the lines between painting and sculpture by liberating the treated canvas from the stretcher or frame, and incorporating materials such as wire mesh, which create an armature for three-dimensional forms. This enabled Samra to explore the dynamics of an artwork as it is experienced in a particular setting while presenting constructive materials as its form and content. These formal and conceptual breakthroughs led to influential installation, video, and multimedia works that continued his career-long investigation of life, the space between birth and death, and how time can be reflected through the visual devices of art.
Maymanah Farhat
Art critic based in New York, USA
Faisal Samra, from the veil to the unveiling
Fusion is characteristic of Faisal Samra’s work. On one part, a cultural amalgam for this Bahrain-born Saudi who studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. This sense of mixture can also found in the media that he utilises, beginning his career with drawings and paintings before delving into performance and video.
By 1989, the artist used primitive and poor materials such as bamboo, threads, or goatskin, focusing on both materials and sensations. Soon after, the fold interferes in his work with the straight line of Deleuze, and as a measure and materialisation of time but also evoking a sense of the most baroque drapery. The fold alludes to a more important metaphor in the Distorted Reality series, initiated in 2005. It's all a game of contrasts that these photos, taken in the context of performance, put into play, ranging from masks and bandages, to pain and camouflage, opacity and transparency. The identity of the artist cracks, vanishes and hybridises itself. Just like in the theatre, everyone wears a mask and holds his or her truths. The artist appears in gnarled postures, like a cilice or camisole.
Swaddled, contorted, the character is constrained in his actions until asphyxia. Is this a clash of cultures? Is it difficult to find a place in this fusion sometimes heavy to bear? Is it about avoiding being seen or seeing? The questions like the answers are varied. “The characters are rebelling against temporality, and trying, out of frustration to counter the media image that controls and veils them. Also, it shows how our visual field is loaded and invaded with images”, says Faisal Samra. “The man becomes a warrior who has no arms, a Don Quixote. His defence is to remove himself from the image rather than adding a layer.” Is it a revolt? Without a doubt, since for Samra, it is a source of renewal. But his way of waging war is more defensive than offensive. Such denunciation imposes itself in dots, between indication and incision rather than in a slogan. As the artist is wary of univocal readings of the world, nothing can be summarised in a single face. This distorted uneven reality also takes its full meaning from the context of rapid urbanisation in the Middle East, where everything suddenly seems artificial, but also the lack of transparency in our political and economical system where things are disordered, without it managing to disentangle itself.
Roxana Azimi