Artist, Mohammed Sami: My name is Mohammed Sami. I'm a painter who was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq. This is a painting I made in 2022, titled The Execution Room.
I don’t think this painting responds to any specific war memory. The painting might be a representation of a war waged between people who don’t know each other, to benefit authorities who know each other very well, and sit down in a room embroidered with gold and silver, for example.
Let’s imagine this painting is a photograph. Your subconscious will respond immediately to this work as a piece of evidence. Therefore, the work will be considered to refer to a certain time and location or event. However, rendering this as a painting makes the location doubtable and helps to raise the following questions: Have you seen this? What kind of decision has been made there? Are there any specific people ever executed there?
My work negotiates with the past, but with one condition: to deny human depiction and allow more space for feeling disorientation and dread rather than comfort, predictability, and security.
Subsequently, the painting exchanged the elements of sympathy—to feel sorry for someone—with the elements of empathy—to put yourself in the position where you became important regardless of your nationality.