Faisal Samra: Distorted Reality

Improvising performative intermediation—interview excerpts

Faisal Samra, *Performance #19, Triptych #1* from the series *Distorted Reality* (2007) Lamda print, 100 x 133.33 cm.

With text by Dr. Effat Fadag

In his artistic process, Faisal Samra allows his experimentive interactions with various media determine the ultimate final form of his work. In many ways it is his mediation through media that determines the resulting visual message. Effat Fadag interviews Samra, who discusses his use of different media within his artistic process.

Effat Fadag (EF): Can you tell us more about your artistic background?

Faisal Samra (FS): My mother is Bahraini and my father is Saudi. In the 80s, I acquired my Bachelor’s degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and have been practicing art since 1992. For me, studying in Paris was very important and influenced me a lot. Merging yourself in a different culture, coexisting with a culture different than yours adds to your experience and practice which I benefited from. Since the 70s I have advocated that fine art colleges in Saudi Arabia should address our culture and historical background. So, if we want to establish fine art colleges we need to have a balance between our historical background and our civilization in parallel with the history of European art practices. The colleges need to graduate artists with identities that are distinct from European artists. I started to make art when I was a child, and first opened my eyes! I was drawing everywhere, on the walls and during school and I still draw now.

EF: What are the topics you’re interested in working on,—references and concepts that evolve around your work? And what are the topics that provoke your art which distinguish yourself from other artists?

FS: I am always interacting with the events that surround me in one way or another. This is in addition to my pure artistic emotions, which guide me to work on various artistic projects with social, critical, political and geopolitical statements. These works depend mainly on the event; it may be in a specific event that had an effect on me to produce an artwork or start working on a project such as Distorted Reality (2005). During that time, I was interested in the distortion in the media as a topic—the political propaganda in everything we see in the media, the distorted reality that affects our lives—and I wanted to address this issue in my work. I started working with digital photography, video and performance. This included various media and led to my second project: CDR, Construction Distraction Re-construction.

EF: What are the references, ideas and your own concepts that evolve around your work?

FS: All of my projects have political, critical, or other dimensions. As a visual artist, I rely on visual pleasure which is my goal in ever project. I always start with a visual experimentation which then develops into other layers and additional dimensions regardless if it is social, or has political dimensions, etc. Sometimes the projects choose you, you don’t choose the project.

EF: Faisal, you are considered an artist who breaks traditional boundaries and artistic classifications, using various media as arbiter for your own artistic experimentation. This gives your work and the subject you are addressing different perspectives. At the same time, your artistic execution is subtly sophisticated and not forced. How do you explain this?

FS: I always say that it is not the media that defines the project, but the project that determines the type of media that you use. I started using the video long before the digital era, during the end of the 90s. When my idea is ready I ask myself how will I execute it? Or what is the best way to present this project? What are the media that I can use which are crisp, clear and to the point? In my work I love to be austere as much as possible, and this means the medium has to help present my idea. In my opinion, when you work on a project or you see an artwork, you expect clarity. When you see a work of art and the idea is there, you can isolate the medium used in that project, and if the project stands alone and was not affected by the loss of the used medium, this means that it does not need that extra burden of an additional medium. Therefore, the project dictates the media and the media does not dictate the theme of the project.

I always work with this simple method. With the Reality of a Warrior, I saw that the work required a more complex use of media, so, I used digital, performance,video, etc. However, in the project that I am working on right now, I started with drawing, sketching and moved to painting, sculpting and photography. Artists should allow their projects to dictate the medium that they work with.

EF: Can you further describe the latest project you are working on?

FS: The Thriving Emotions project is my most recent body of work and is a purely experimental project that depends on actual experience. I started the process sketching with charcoal, then I was propelled to work with oil painting and sculpting and photography.

This new body of work is related to emotions—in its most innocent condition— and passion specifically. In order to allow these emotions to flourish, it is necessary to use the cognitive process moving from the unconscious to the conscious, a process of thinking through the mind. I experimented with abstract emotions—unlike joy or sadness—they are emotions that relate to the form of the medium being worked with. It is an improvisation process that creates the relationship between you and the medium, such as charcoal or color. I improvise with these materials without thinking. The material is purely emotional, until the process of consciousness starts to form which is refined from escaped emotions. I interact with charcoal in the painting, drawing to embody movement. I then use color to embody the air and sculpted forms. In the resulting images, the layout embodies movement while the oil painting embodies the emptiness of a void.

Improvising performative intermediation—interview excerpts

TINTERA Gallery