The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present To Whom It May Concern, the first solo exhibition in Ireland by artist Mohammed Sami, bringing together a group of major new canvases, alongside a selection of paintings made over the last five years.

Mohammed Sami is a painter. Working directly onto canvas with brushes, pallet knives and spray paint, Sami creates textures, surfaces and details building the composition as a whole.  Mining personal experiences to ground his work and influenced by Arabic literature and poetry, Sami replaces images of trauma with oblique references to loss or conflict. Although absent of the human form, the settings, everyday objects, and shadows in his paintings convey traces of human presence. He uses medium, scale, and title, each cultivating the other to create charged and haunting works.

Absence is at the heart of this work, from an empty throne to a meeting table with chairs pulled out in expectation or in the aftermath of an event. Indeed, the title of the exhibition makes an address but to whom? In these absences or ‘acts of invisibility’ sense memories come forth, not the memory of the thing but the effect of those memories. As Sami has said, ‘My paintings seek to capture the state of confusion that occurs because of the cut thread between reality and the imagination; between war narrated and war witnessed.” In the tension between the remembering and the forgetting, in the ambiguity of this, through light, shadow, and the banal, Sami creates a space for feeling to emerge.