Faisal Samra Exhibition @ Ayyam Gallery, Dubai - "Immortal Moment II - Coping with the Shock"

Faisal Samra

Immortal Moment II - Coping with the Shock

Ayyam Gallery, Dubai

27 February - 15 April 2024

FAISAL SAMRA

PSF-P2, 2023 

Charcoal, Ink & Oil on Canvas, 50.5 x 50.5 cm

© Faisal Samra, Courtesy Ayyam Gallery

Ayyam Gallery presents Immortal Moment II - Coping with the Shock, a solo exhibition featuring Faisal Samra’s recent body of work.

This exhibition showcases the second body of work from the Immortal Moment project, in which Faisal Samra creates artworks through the accumulation of instances, pushing the viewer to question the opportunities of a single moment. In the first chapter of this project, Faisal describes the technique as capturing a moment and immortalizing it in time through gestural performances, serving as an expression of emotions. However, now, he defines the outcome as a “shock”. This exhibition reveals the process of Coping with the Shock. 

While the concept of fight or flight is thoroughly examined in the fields of medicine and psychology, Faisal Samra introduces a novel conceptualisation of it through his artistic practice. At a moment of shock, either the moment dominates and controls us, or we absorb and adapt to it, metamorphosing into a new form. To survive and overcome the shock is what we call coping.

In the spirit of fight, the artist intervenes post gesture to cope with what chance and the laws of physics produce. The study of the improvised creation allows the artist to seek meaning within the abstraction. Therefore creating postshock creatures and figures. In a meditative process, the summation of dots and splashes of color amount to what the artist is looking for. Ultimately, this artistic endeavor becomes an endless cycle of documentation, acts, and gestures that trace time and immortalize it, one overcoming the other.

The cyclic timeline in capturing the essence of moments is evident in his concepts and the evolution of his artistic practice. In the Distorted Reality series (2005/2011), Faisal chose a moment from countless stills of filmed performances. In the subsequent project, Thriving Emotions - Immortal Moment the artist identifies the moment before anything else. The emphasis lay on the emotion conveyed through the spontaneous act of creating marks. The Immortal Moment project comes to a full circle in this exhibition: through gestural mark-making, Faisal Samra restructures the singular moment of action to birth a new series of moments to establish control amidst the unpredictable.

The dialogue between the abstract and figurative, conceptually or formalistically, is essential to Faisal Samra’s work. Time, being one of the most abstract ideas becomes figurative when Faisal visually notes down specific points in time through the use of charcoal and paint. The result is formalistically abstract, but the final creation becomes figurative through several interventions, which represent a culmination of temporal instances. 

FAISAL SAMRA - BIOGRAPHY

Long considered one of the Arab Gulf’s foremost artists and a pioneer of conceptual art in the Middle East, Bahrainiborn, 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 center. Since the mid-1970s, Faisal Samra has tested the conventional 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 traditional modes of representation, he has rebelled against his own understanding of art, transitioning into new works that maintain three essential concepts: spontaneity, dynamism, and secrecy.

In 1974, Faisal Samra emigrated from Saudi Arabia to France to attend the Ecole 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 Faisal Samra’s development was distinguished by expressionist drawings and paintings that investigate the body in motion or at rest, establishing a conceptual basis for later videos, photographs, and installations, while also demonstrating his initial rejection of the prescribed forms of figuration. Upon graduating from the ENSBA in 1980, Faisal Samra settled in Saudi Arabia and continued to exhibit abroad. In the late 1980s, he returned to France, where he spent four years as an art consultant at the Institut du Monde Arabe. 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 Institut du Monde Arabe that established Faisal 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, Faisal 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 Faisal 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.

The artist’s selected solo exhibitions include the Ministry of Culture in Bahrain (2016); Bin Matter House, Bahrain (2015); Ayyam Gallery Al Quoz, Dubai (2014); Ayyam Gallery London (2014); Ayyam Gallery Jeddah (2013); HD Galerie, Casablanca (2012); Traffic Gallery, Dubai (2011); Albareh Gallery, Bahrain (2010); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2009); XVA Gallery, Dubai (2007).

Recently, Faisal Samra has participated in collective exhibitions at the Bienalsur, Argentina (2019); OFF Biennale Cairo (2018, 2015); Musée Labinet, France (2017); Low Gallery, San Diego, USA (2016); Abu Dhabi Festival, UAE (2015); Busan Museum, South Korea; FotoFest, Houston (2014), Edge of Arabia, London (2012); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Maraya Art Center, Sharjah (2010).

Faisal Samra’s works are housed in the collections of The British Museum, London; BuchDruckKunst e.V Art Book Museum, Hamburg; the National Museum, Mexico City; the Modern Art Museum, Cairo; Almansouria Foundation, Jeddah; Jameel Art Foundation, Jeddah; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and Bahrain National Museum, Manama, among others. He has participated in biennials in Singapore and Cairo (2008) and is a jury member for the Alexandria Biennale, Egypt.

In 2012, Skira Editore published an eponymous monograph on the artist.

AYYAM GALLERY

B11, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai

www.ayyamgallery.com

Tammam Azzam @ Ayyam Gallery, Dubai - يوميات - Diary Exhibition

Tammam Azzam

يوميات - Diary

Ayyam Gallery, Dubai

8 January - 20 February 2024

TAMMAM AZZAM

Railway, 2023 

Paper Collage on Canvas, 90 x 130 cm

© Tamman Azzam / Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Ayyam Gallery presents Diary, a solo exhibition featuring TAMMAM AZZAM’s recent body of work.

In the exhibition Diary, Tammam Azzam, an artist known for his profound explorations of the destruction and reconstruction of an image or space, showcases works that play with perspective. Horizon lines expand outward and urban vistas are cut into parts, interrupted like the lines of a window frame. In one untitled 2021 painting, the sky is a turquoise sea-blue, which complicates the boundaries of the subject, an earthy terrain referencing the lava fields in the south of Syria, where Azzam is from. The sea-sky’s color marks a tonality he has carried with him, visible in paintings of scenes from parts of Berlin, thus connecting different places in visual moments.

In four 2022 studies on paper, Azzam zooms in on a particular building in a Berlin neighborhood, mapping its rise with a rectangular grid of windows. At times the rectangles are left blank like empty plots and while in other cases they are filled in and fused. Through the use of color, the architecture — enveloped by a conventional sky or muddy green and red — becomes a subjective reality. 

2018 marked a significant turning point for Azzam, where he delved into paper collages. The papers he uses, varying from 30 to 110 grams, are layered, glued and constituted in detail through a meticulous use of color. His resulting broken-up façades move beyond the collapsed cityscapes evident in other signature works such as the largely monochrome 2014 series Storeys. Where much of Azzam’s previous work has been seen to index the war-torn country he left behind in 2016, his visual narratives construct an arc broader than displacement and memory. Pieced together in collages on canvas like intricate yet imperfect puzzles, the artist evokes a vision about to be formed. The painted paper collages are symbolic of the delicate balance between fragility and creation, between a weathered façade and fluid abstractions of nature. In Neukladow for example, a certain opacity in technique is tempered with washes and reflections of water.

In his depictions of empty roads that go beyond our field of vision, he creates a topography like veins of marble, disappearing in the distance. Each fragment in his work (of color, material, form) is a piece of time, a rhythm. And the entire picture is more than the sum of its parts. Take the 2023 collage of copper-toned tectonic plates which could equally be the earth’s crust or an icy lake shimmering in the sun. Just above the painting’s center the ground become a vertical, cracked wall. This kind of shift in vantage point impacts the work’s sense of dimension and texture as well as the ways in which the eye travels and rests — how we understand the world and time.

As Azzam bears witness to his surroundings, adopting a point of view that is never top-down but consistently frontal, he emphasizes a minute scale within more-than-human worlds. Empty of living beings and yet eerily familiar, these are instances of stillness and presence — situated after an event has already happened, or before an imminent occurrence.

Text by Nadine Khalil

TAMMAM AZZAM - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Damascus, Syria in 1980, Tammam Azzam received his artistic training from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Damascus with a concentration in oil painting. Alongside a successful career as a painter in Syria, Azzam was a prolific graphic designer, an experience that would inform his digital media work after relocating to Dubai with the start of the country’s conflict.

The initial phase of Tammam Azzam’s work was distinguished by a ‘hybrid form’ of painting with applications of various media that allowed him to arrive at tactile interactions between surface and form that multiply as compositions evolve. These semi-abstract works use unconventional materials such as rope, clothespins, and other found objects in order to accentuate the depth, texture, and space of laboured picture planes, creating a visible tension. Although outwardly different in appearance, the series that resulted from these early experiments were inspired by the artist’s changing perceptions of specific urban environments.

Following the start of the uprising in Syria, Tammam Azzam turned to digital media and graphic art to create visual composites of the conflict that resonated with international viewers. These widely distributed works are informed by his interest in the interventionist potential of digital photography and street art as powerful and direct forms of protest that are difficult to suppress. In early 2013, Tammam Azzam made worldwide headlines when his Freedom Graffiti print went viral on social media.

Recently, he has returned to painting with Storeys, a series of monumental works on canvas that communicate the magnitude of devastation experienced across his native country through expressionist compositions of destroyed cityscapes. Chronicling the current state of his homeland, Tammam Azzam delves into a cathartic exercise of reconstruction, storey by storey. Alongside these new paintings, he has produced a significant body of giclée prints and installations that depict the facets of cities through similar themes.

Tammam Azzam has contributed to large-scale international exhibitions such as the FUU-Street Art Festival, Sarajevo (2015); Vancouver Biennale, where he was in residence (2014); FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2014); Dak’Art: Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Dakar (2014); Alexandria Biennale (2014); and the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2013).

In recent years, Tamman Azzam has participated in solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Kornfeld Gallery, Berlin, German (2022), Museen in Sudtirol in Tirol, Italy (2020); Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA (2019); Ayyam Gallery - 11 Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2019, 2016); Kornfeld Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2018); Bienal del Sur, Caracas (2017); Künstlerforum Bonn, Bonn (2017); For-Site Foundation, San Francisco (2017, 2016); European Capital of Culture-Pafos, Pafos (2017); City Museum of Odenburg, Oldenburg (2017); Künstlerverein Walkmühle, Wiesbaden (2016); Columbia University, New York (2016); Tainiothiki Twixtlab, Athens (2016); Banksy’s Dismaland, Weston-super-Mare (2015); Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (2015); Framer Framed in de Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (2015); Forum Factory, Berlin (2014); Lena & Roselli Gallery, Budapest (2014); Liquid Art House, Boston (2014); Rush Arts, New York (2014); Busan Museum of Art, Seoul (2014); 1x1 Art Gallery, New Delhi (2014).

In 2016, Tammam Azzam received an artist fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Delmonhost.

AYYAM GALLERY

B11, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai

www.ayyamgallery.com