Distorted Reality
Faisal Samra
Saudi Artist
Saudi-Arabian
artist Faisal Samra’s Distorted Reality combines digital
photography, video, performance, and computer graphics. Performance,
in particular, plays an integral role within the work, acting
as a chief tool of expression that sets up a dialogue between
itself and the overarching concept of the piece.
Distorted Reality is the artist’s critique of the images
that we are constantly barraged with, immersed in, and hypnotized
by in this day and age. These images have been carefully conceived
and created of a reality that has been doctored and distorted,
a reality that has been tailored by multinational corporations,
mass media machines, and political regimes to deceivingly
appear attractive. Samra underlines the fallacy of such dolled-up
images by subversively using the same media that they do in
order to satirically parody their phoniness, exposing their
truly dubious nature and their artful purpose.
Within
Distorted Reality, Faisal Samra presents and merges actual
elements in a bizarre and otherworldly manner, transporting
the viewer into an unknown realm, a space that is quasi-fantastical
yet fundamentally based upon reality, a place that reflects
the outer world. Through the warping of reality in his work,
Samra, as many artists do, unveils hidden truths. As part
of this revealing process - this commentary on the deceptiveness
of "made-up images" - Samra plays with the symbolic depths
of masks and the act of masking, delves into the theme of
appearance/illusion versus reality/factuality, tackles the
contradictions commonly existent between surface and interior,
and broaches the tangled issue of image construction.
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Faisal
Samra - Curriculum Vitae Born
in Bahrain, Faisal Samra studied at the Ecole Nationale
Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Having dabbled with
design, Samra’s diverse artworks, which combine media
such as painting, sculpture, and installation, reveal
an obsession with visual culture and imagery, often
involving a mélange of references to historical and
contemporary realities. A nomad wandering through time,
Samra has participated in various group exhibitions
including “Languages of the Desert: Contemporary Arab
Art from the Gulf States” that was shown at the Institut
du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2006 and at the Kunstmuseum
in Bonn in 2005 as well as "Word into Art: Artists of
the Modern Middle East" that was displayed at the British
Museum in London in 2006. He has had numerous solo exhibitions
like “Repeated and Different” at Galerie Epreuve d'
Artiste in Beirut in 1999 and “Nabatiyat” at Darat al
Funun in Amman in 1996. Samra's work is held in several
private and museum collections such as the British Museum,
the Bahrain National Museum, the Kinda Collection in
Riyadh, as well as the Khalid Shoman Private Collection.
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