- Fridericianum
In his new body of work Hostless, Mohammed Sami focuses predominantly on internal spaces. The paintings become a site for mnemonic processes, mental operations in which abstraction falters and something unsettling begins to seep through. Rooms become spectral containers, holding the residue of events that agreed to stay unnamed despite of the availability of the crime evidence. These interiors are literal in their unease yet evasive in meaning, trembling with a physicality that painting, as a practice, refuses to fully define or contain. Objects behave as floating signifiers, denoting an absent violence or a memory made consumable only through distance. The formal language in his new paintings allow the ‘horror’ to become an optional element for viewers, not performed, but quietly endured, revealed through the stubborn materiality of what remains. Following exhibitions dedicated to Sami’s work in England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Ireland, the Fridericianum is now presenting the artist’s first institutional exhibition in Germany.
