Mohammed Sami’s paintings explore the stratifications of memory and trauma triggered by common everyday objects and environments ever since he immigrated to Sweden as a refugee from his native Iraq.
Rather than directly relating to the Iraq conflict, which he witnessed first-hand, Sami’s paintings articulate its recollection remotely and obliquely – usually through traditional painting subjects such as still-life, interiors and landscapes, pervaded by a sense of unease, absence and metaphorical allusion.
23 Years of Night shows a boarded-up interior, mirrored and fragmented. The impossibility to enter or to look in from the outside alludes to a safe domestic space while a war or other danger rages beyond its limits. A place of inner warmth amongst external turmoil.