Distorted Reality
The art of Faisal Samra from paint, pen and
clay to the digital image and data file
by: Kaelen
Wilson-Goldie
The
shift in Faisal Samra’s artistic practice from drawings,
paintings and sculptures to accumulative installations, digital
photographs and performative videos would seem, to the casual
observer, to be dramatic, signifying a sharp break from one
mode of art-making toward a quick and total embrace of another.
Yet closer consideration of Samra’s oeuvre over more
than three decades of creative output reveals both a seamless
progression and a steady commitment to art as a visceral expression
of lived experience. Samra’s medium of choice may change,
but his desire to find forms with the capacity to make manifest
all the forces that act upon one’s being – such
as the formation of identity, the impression of memory, the
struggle to build up a sense of self or strip down everything
extraneous to a spiritual or emotional core – this is
constant across his art.
The
exhibition “Distorted Reality” at Darat al-Funun
hinges on trilogies. There are three videos – Distorted
Reality (Improvisation), Distorted Reality (Looking in the
Hole) and Distorted Reality (Earth to Earth) – and several
photographic series that are similarly grouped by three. The
number is significant in so far as it suggests a process –
with a beginning, middle and end – and a practice –
in what now seems like that old fashioned notion of try, try
and try again. These trilogies speak of efforts, attempts
and endeavors, and of challenges, pursuits and possible narratives.
Distorted
Reality (Improvisation) is itself divided into three acts.
As the artist explains in an interview with Nadia al-Issa:
“Every action … has a beginning (a birth) and
an ending (a death). As such, every gesture that I performed
ended – died – instantly. This is the peculiar
nature of creation. Creation is, in essence, a continuous
cycle of construction and destruction.”
The
architecture of Samra’s latest body of work –
on both the micro and macro levels – builds into its
very structure a consideration of the creative act, and what
it means to conceive, execute and share a work of art. That
“Distorted Reality” does this while also skewering
a contemporary landscape that is littered with empty, meaningless
images and cluttered with signifiers floating for so long
without their referents as to become junk amounts to a serious
and sustained meditation on what it means to be an artist
in the here and now.
A
Saudi national who was born and raised in Bahrain, Samra studied
fine art in Paris and worked for a time with the Institut
du Monde Arabe. He traveled to Morocco in the 1990s to research
handcrafted design objects and Islamic aesthetics in Fez,
Marrakech and Rabat. In the early part of this decade, he
lived and worked in Beirut and Amman. He maintains a studio
in Bahrain to this day. He has shown steadily in the Middle
East and Europe since the mid 1970s. His solo exhibition at
Darat al-Funun is the second he has staged under the same
title. One imagines a third is surely in the works.
Samra
became widely known for the paintings he liberated from frames
– he painted, layered and otherwise piled up material
on large-scale canvases and then hung them from bamboo. His
series “Bent” featured canvases that were painted,
folded, sewn and suspended. These works broke the boundary
between pictorial and sculptural space. Samra wasn’t
the first to do this, but it was a rebellion nonetheless.
“I would like to apologize to the viewer who is looking
in my work for ornamental beauty,” he once wrote in
an exhibition catalogue. “I am a lover of the beauty
of the soul, which I strive to achieve through unadorned material.”
In
an interview with Susan Eisner Eley, he said: “I am
part of a long tradition of abstract painters who choose not
to imitate reality but to explore how it makes us feel and
behave.” That last verb is key. The subject in Samra’s
work seems to be both artist and viewer at once and neither
is static. Both are dynamic players in a dense matrix of actions
and reactions. As such, one can detect empathy and a generosity
of spirit in his art. His pieces don’t speak for you,
through you or at you but rather of you and with you. He renders
visual the experiences you share from the root of your humanity.
As
Samra moves into photographs and videos, into digital images
and data files that seem so at odds with his earlier and entirely
tactile studio practice, the evocation of touch and texture
remains paramount. To run through the list of materials Samra
has employed over the years, one finds the following: glass,
terra cotta, wire mesh, tie-dyed cloth, toy animals, dismembered
dolls, henna, galvanized steel, india ink, modeling clay,
transparent plastic, wood, leather, sand, iron, mud, feathers,
yarn, newspaper clippings, pages torn from elementary school
textbooks, faded posters of Indian film stars from the 1950s,
reproductions of Islamic miniatures, old photographs of Lebanese
and Egyptian singers and fabrics, always fabrics, and specifically
canvas.
The
use of textiles, broadly speaking, constitutes a complex sub-genre
of cultural production throughout the Arab world, starting
with historical accounts of – and perpetuated in apparent
nostalgia for – the Silk Road. Contemporary artists
with roots across the Middle East have, in the past decade,
appropriated fabrics in their works to stage sensuality, sexuality
and more often than not a radical feminist critique of society
and its calibrations toward gender equity.
Ghada
Amer, for example, juxtaposes abstract expressionism (masculine,
muscular, produced by the body and the force of physical exertion)
and embroidery (deemed quintessentially feminine, painstaking,
time-consuming, fragile and precise). In her paintings she
also creates an unlikely union between rough, stretched, taut
canvas and messy, meandering, unruly thread, maybe spun from
silk or cotton but rather more likely a synthetic imitation
or a combination of the two.
Jananne
al-Ani explores constructions of otherness, orientalist fantasies
of full exposure and the constantly shifting symbolism of
the veil; Ghazel’s videos and performance pieces toy
with the social uses and political implications of dress,
whether a white wedding gown or a black chador; Shadafarin
Ghadirian, in her series of photographs titled “Like
Everyday,” includes a wry portrait of a veil draped
over a broomstick.
These
artists delve directly and indirectly into the relationship
between fabric and sexual identity, and at the same time problematize
assumptions that Middle Eastern textiles are necessarily spicy
and exotic or nostalgic and folkloric. Like the photographs
of Tarek al-Ghoussein, who prints images of construction sites
in Sharjah (reminiscent of the barrier wall in Palestine)
on delicate Japanese rice paper to evoke contradiction, these
works are all somehow informed by the era of globalization
and the flow of free trade, where goods travel more easily
than bodies. And like Hoda Barakat’s novel The Tiller
of Waters, in which the central protagonist uses the bolts
of fabric in his father’s derelict shop in downtown
Beirut to recount stories from his childhood like a modern-day
male version of Sheherazade, they illustrate the capacity
of fabrics, textiles and cloths to hold histories over time
and carry immense metaphorical weight in contemporary cultural
production.
In
Samra’s Distorted Reality (Improvisation), the artist
repeatedly wraps rough canvas around his head and body, contorting
his posture, twisting his limbs and covering himself in folds
of fabric to the point of near suffocation. Though totally
improvised as the title dictates, the video possesses the
stirring beauty of a carefully choreographed contemporary
dance. The canvas stands in as both the artist’s skin
– and by extension the construction of the self –
and the reality of the world that has been twisted and distorted
by false advertising and images that tell lies rather than
truths.
It
is striking that Samra, in critiquing a media landscape like
a retread of Guy Debord, does not – as so many more
shallow contemporary arts works would do – replicate
the glut of images he is condemning for the psychic damage
they cause. He does not resort to their powers to seduce.
Instead, he invents a performance that emulates a process
– not an outcome or a static condition – using
a material that has always shaped the spine of his work.
In
the photographic series that supports this particular video,
one finds the artist in freeze frames of a similar performance.
Movement is indicated in the body and the blur of canvas as
it is twisted and spun. The hand of the artist is no longer
present, as it would have been in the brushstrokes of a painting.
But the artist retains his presence, his agency and command
over the creative act, through his depiction of the body.
Then,
in the digital manipulation of each image, his body is obscured,
even addled, with things such as a parrot, a Venetian mask
or a bouquet of roses. These additions are, in a sense, both
the floating signifiers from which one is alienated in contemporary
life overrun with empty ads, and tokens of easy aesthetic
pleasure. Again, Samra is questioning what it means to create
images in a world already supersaturated with them and too
heavily mediatized to ensure any productive meaning may be
conveyed or allowed to cut through the rest of the riffraff.
There
was a point in Samra’s career in which he said he had
accumulated so much visual and sensational baggage that he
had to “burn the luggage,” to strip down and renew.
The materials he collected to stoke both personal and collective
memories had to be cleared, in a process not unlike that undertaken
in Rabih Mroue’s performance piece “Make Me Stop
Smoking,” in which the power of an archive, like history,
is dismantled and defused. “Distorted Reality”
embarks on a similar process of wiping the slate clean.
The
lingering sadness, even loneliness of the exhibition stems
from an understanding that the material in question –
advertising and the stuff of mass media – is useless.
It doesn’t recall childhood or homeland. It is part
of a relentless, global data stream, white noise without the
echo or even the romance of a ghost in the machine. To do
this with material that is itself data rather than paint or
pen or clay is a defiant stand, as if Samra is taking a challenge
and responding with proof that he will master this media like
any other. Whatever becomes the tool of his times, he will
bend to his practice.
This
is a reassertion of the artist’s role in society, and
probably somewhere in the mix, a restaging of masculinity
as well – the body active, the canvas coarse, the movements
as decisive as those captured in iconic films of Jackson Pollack
striding around paintings laid out on the floor. Samra once
said that he never wanted to be a slave to materials, that
he chose materials for their spirit and character and that
he employed them only in so far as they suited what he wanted
to say. Such an approach lends Samra’s work, over so
many stages of development, its consistency. As the curator
Frans J. Sterk once remarked, Samra’s artworks function
as “message carriers, accumulations of lives, experiences,
impressions, sensations and the memory of it all.” It
is curious that critics have time and again called Samra a
postmodernist. He is more accurately a humanist to the core.
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