Sami Mohammad

Abstract

Sami Mohammad’s artistic contributions constitute a significant chapter in Kuwait’s art history, with his six-decade-long practice as a sculptor and painter focusing on timely themes that have brought him widespread acclaim. He developed his art serially, using motifs and stylistic elements to articulate a universal critique of the forces that undermine the civic sphere. However, a dichotomy marks his oeuvre: while some of his serial sculptures dramatise the unsettling spectacle of human suffering, others suggest a joyous perspective on peace. Mohammad is justifiably famous for a sculptural aesthetic based on his knowledge of human anatomy, terseness of expression, and a commitment to socio-political themes. By contrast, his paintings draw upon a wide range of artistic devices.

Biography

Sami Mohammad was born on 1 October 1943, in the al-Sawaber quarter of Sharq, the oldest part of Kuwait City. The eldest son of a tailor of modest means who specialised in making bishūt (the bisht is a type of traditional cloak worn by men) as well as their zari (metallic) embroidery. Known for his needlework skills, his father often travelled to nearby towns in the Arabian Gulf, leaving home management to his resilient wife. Mohammad spent his childhood frequenting the city’s old quarters for diversion, especially in the port areas, where the bustle of life was intense. At the age of ten, he began obtaining clay and sea-rocks from between the mud houses and the seafront, shaping them into the natural forms of birds and animals—a hobby that kindled in him a love of sculpting. In 1949, he began attending al-Sabah Elementary School in Sharq. But the older students bullied him, and consequently, his mother pulled him out of school. After a three-year pause, he resumed his education.

Mohammad grew up when modern education was making its salient impacts on Kuwaiti society. It was also a time when the government pursued ambitious plans to incubate new cultural forms such as visual/plastic arts and theatre. In 1956, his family moved to Keifan, a new residential suburb with European-style villas that were built and provided by the government for Kuwaiti citizens of limited means (or offered in exchange for purchasing their property within the old city). This year, Mohammad attended al-Shamia Intermediate School, and it was during his years at the school that Shawqi al-Dousoqi, an art teacher and ceramist from Egypt, began to provide Mohammad with artistic training. He also participated in a school sculpture project commemorating the joint Anglo-French-Israeli military attack on Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis. The art teachers assigned him to sculpt human figures representing soldiers and civilian casualties, and much to his satisfaction, Sheikh Abdullah al-Jaber, director of the Bureau of Education, awarded him a prize for his talented contribution to the project.

Although unsympathetic to his love of art, Mohammad’s mother did not hinder his ambition to become an artist. His pursuit of art as a career began in earnest in 1960, when as a novice he attended classes taught by the Egyptian sculptor Anwer al-Srouji. In 1961, he entered Keifan High School, but in 1962 he left to join the Marsam Al Hurr (Free Atelier), an institutional unit within the Kuwait Ministry of Education—as a full-time artist provided with a life-long stipend and studio space.

In 1966, Mohammad obtained a government scholarship to study abroad. After passing the qualifying entrance exam for The College of Fine Arts in Cairo, he began four years of academic training. The curriculum consisted of different art media and genres of painting and sculpture, art history, the composition principles used by different art movements, and human anatomy. He was particularly fascinated by the role of anatomy in Michelangelo’s art. Foremost among the teachers to expose him to sculptural techniques was Jamal al-Sajeeni, a cherished mentor who validated Mohammad’s ambitions and pursuit of a distinctive style.

A subsequent government scholarship (1974–1976) took him to the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture in Princeton, New Jersey. There, he gave anatomy tutorials to his fellow enrollees and took the opportunity to frequent the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia.

Mohammad married in 1965. Between 1966 and 1980, his family grew to include five children. In certain artworks produced between 1973 and 1977, he integrated his personal life experiences within his sculptures. His adulation of family life borrowed its aesthetic from Henry Moore’s formalistic style—employment of curvilinear planes, biomorphic forms, and pleasing rhythms—envisioning through Moore’s style the conjugation of femininity, vitality, and growth. Nevertheless, the influence of Moore’s style did not last for very long. Beginning in 1978, other life experiences—many concerning media coverage of regional and international wars and struggles—became the catalyst for his vision of a vast marginalised humanity who inhabits our contemporary world. This point of departure prompted Mohammad to pursue a realist approach that conveys an immediate and arresting visual effect.

However, the origins of his preferred theme, the ubiquitousness of brutality, possess deeper roots. Mohammad grew up in the shadow of the anti-colonial movements that in the 1940s and 1950s prompted a heightened political consciousness to arise throughout the Arab world, one aspiring to end foreign dominations, both new and old. Certain events are worth mentioning in this regard. The 1948 Nakba, during which Zionist Israeli militias inflicted horrific destruction and atrocities upon Palestinians, and the 1954–1962 Algerian War of Independence, where France committed numerous war crimes, are two conflicts that make the existential tendencies in Mohammad’s art historically explicable.

More personal experiences with unexpected pain and violence also left a mark on Mohammad’s memory, three of which are worth mentioning. During his childhood in al-Sawaber, and upon the entry of a delivery truck into an alley, he and his playmates, in their elation, hung from the sides of the truck. He suddenly found his dishdasha (traditional ankle-length robe) caught in the spokes of the truck wheel, and his body was tossed violently about, a traumatic incident entailing hospitalisation. Another incident involved witnessing the slaughter of a camel in 1969, where butchers used ropes and sharp knives to slaughter the helpless animal. Another experience where the personal and political directly intersected occurred during Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, saw Mohammad witness first-hand the devastation inflicted by the Iraqi aggressors while remaining in the country to care for his elderly mother.

Like many Arab intellectuals and literati during the post-colonial decades, Mohammad was intrigued by the question of freedom of expression, critique of authoritarian practices, and the necessity of preserving human rights. Notwithstanding his socio-political consciousness, throughout his career he consistently denounced art used either for expressing a narrow, isolated self or for propaganda purposes. What his sculptural art affirms, as in his early works— for example, Hunger (1970) —is independent commentary sustained by a humanistic and ethical point of view.

As his interviews reveal, Mohammad believes that the artist’s public role is indispensable to the civic sphere. Even while abroad he remained engaged with his fellow Kuwaiti artists’ efforts to establish the Kuwait Society for Formative Arts (founded in 1967 and renamed the Kuwait Association of Fine Arts in 2004). His ongoing commitment to the cultivation of art is also demonstrated by his establishing Dar Mariam in 2024, a self-funded museum-house that is open to the public and holds his existing oeuvre.

Sami Mohammad’s art has a rationalistic orientation; surrealistic elements rarely occur. His process of composition is guided by two overarching descriptors related to the overriding socio-political structures that operate within modern civic society; one concerning idealistic efforts to foster, metaphorically speaking, utopian conditions, and the other concerned with deterring dystopic tendencies of society. Both descriptors have clear, rational foundations rooted in the obvious duality of freedom versus captivity, human dignity versus human oppression. Consequently, Mohammad’s art imparts two antithetical perspectives that co-exist but rarely overlap: on the one hand, his disquieting perspective on suffering; on the other, a joyous perspective on peace. Each perspective is embodied in his serial artworks. For example, series such as The Boxes & The Call for Help, The Penetration, The Age of Affliction, The Fright Quartet, Stop, and The Greys communicate disquiet, while the Sadawiyat series and the Saharawiyat series (self-coined words that can be translated as Sadu-inspired and desert-derived) communicate a feeling of joy. A single series, the Inssaniyat wa Sadawiyat series (which can be translated as Humaneness and Sadu-Inspired) seems to embody both perspectives at the same time, although enigmatically.

An overview of Mohammad’s various series of paintings and sculptures demonstrates his employment of iconic techniques as well as a tenacious search for novelty. For example, in the several bronze sculptural series (in the round) produced from 1978 to 2014, one iconic, dramatic element lies at the core of his compositions—an element which evokes the horrors of carceral space while simultaneously narrating the deteriorating conditions of a formerly athletic male body. The dramatic elements within these series emphasise movement and the conflict between the human self and threatening objects, such as ropes, pillars, and narrow exits. Although the artworks do not explicitly refer to any specific time or geography, they foreground the ills of authoritarianism that arise wherever and whenever the civic sphere becomes militarised. Nevertheless, the several series do not portray a stark pessimism, but rather a liminal, in-between moment where the restraining object has been partially undone yet freedom remains elusive.

Conversely, beginning in 1977 Mohammad began to explore abstraction and simplification in his paintings. Although The Curves series veers toward total abstraction, the employment of intersecting curved and straight lines led to his becoming mesmerised with Sadu (female Bedouin weaving) art, especially its pictorial significance. The Sadawiyat series (1980–2001) is a call to distil from indigenous female folk art an innovative starting point for a new artistic style rooted in local Kuwaiti culture yet still of a vanguard nature that does not yield itself to rational analysis or clear thematic content.

In the groupings within the Saharawiyat series, Mohammad shuns three-dimensional space. The imagined desert life in the series imparts a euphoric feeling and uses lively colours and novel aesthetic idioms. For example, alNuwair group takes an environmental bent, relying on a palette of vivid colours, flat units, and repetitive patterns to create a decipherable spatial whole. In The Spindle group, Mohammad works with allegory; the consistent presence of camels, woven rugs, a female hand, and a spindle whose thread runs capriciously over the painted planes signify serenity. Altogether, the elements in the Saharawiyat series express a steadfast ethos of peaceful space.

Mohammad’s public art commissions offered him a unique opportunity to depict the concept of the exemplary. His monuments to Sheikhs Abdulla al-Salem and Sabah al-Salem are realistic and congruent with the popular perception of their personalities. The monument to Sheikh Abdulla al-Salem depicts Kuwait’s first post-independence emir seated upon an armchair decorated with pictorial signs enumerating his different achievements, right-hand resting on the constitution – embodying the noble leader who has decisively endorsed democracy and the constitutional path. In a similar vein, Mohammad’s monument to Sheikh Sabah al-Salem shows the Emir clad in a beautifully embroidered bisht, extending his arm to greet the nation before taking forward socio-economic developmental steps. The gesture is a reaffirmation of the political heritage pertaining to the reciprocal bond between the ruler and the nation. Unlike these monuments, al-Sidra discards realism, its large biomorphic shape conjuring up images of three forces—mother nature, the matriarch, and the dunes of the motherland—signalling the reciprocity that underlies the vital formation of an ideal.

The responsive chords resonating in Mohammad’s artworks have led to widespread media coverage and collectors’ interest, as well as sales at Dubai Christie auctions—all of which heightened Mohammad’s international presence.

To conclude, Sami Mohammad’s works are in keeping with the view that the artist should have an active role in highlighting the destruction of civic life. Furthermore, his art balances three elements: clear-cut forms, the viewer’s emotional reaction, and different thematic registers, whether conveyed clearly or obliquely. His achievement in balancing these elements renders his artwork an intellectual feat. 

Bibliography

ʿĀbdūlʿāl, Aḥmed. 2003. “Sami Moḥammad ʿEmlāq Yūjīd al-ḥlm wa al-Tāmārrud” (Sami Mohammad: A Virtuoso Proficient in Envisioning and Rebelling). Al-Nahḍā, August 30

ʿĀbdūl-Mughnī, Khālid. 2007. “Sami Moḥammad . . Nadīm al-Ḥurriya wa al-Insānniya” (Sami Mohammad: Advocate of Freedom and Humanity). Le Monde Diplomatique (Edition Arabe-Kuwait), September, no 9.

Ali, Zahra A. Hussein .“Aesthetics of Memorialization: The Sabra and Shatila Genocide in the Work of Sami Mohammad, Jean Genet, and June Jordan.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and The Arts 51, no. 4 (2010): 589-621. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/crt.2010.0009.

———. Sami Mohammed and the Semiotics of Abstraction: Folk Art as Muse. English and Arabic. Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2004.

———. “The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley.” Comparative Literature Studies 49, no.1 (2012): 50-83. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/466270.

Al-Muʿalla, Ṭālāl. 1999. “Sami Moḥammad . . Nāzʿ Ẓūrūf al-Eḍihād min ʿAwālim al-Inssān Mūhimmatī” in Aḥwāl al-Ṣūrāh (“Sami Moḥammad . . Removing the Circumstances of Oppression is My Mission” in Circumstantial Phases of the Image). Dār al-Thāqāfā Wa al-Eʿlām, Sharjah, UAE.

Al-Qāysī, ʿOmrān. 2001. “Sami Moḥammad. . al-Tāwāzūn bāynā al-Māwrūth al- Shāʿbī wa al-Bīnaʾ al-Sūrīyyālī (Sami Mohammad. The Balance between Folk Tradition and Surrealistic Compositions). Al-Khālīj al-Thāqāfī, October, no. 8184.

Al-Qattan, Lidia. 1996. “Pioneers of Kuwait” Arab Times, March 18.

Bāqshīsh, Maḥmūd. 1997. “Sami Moḥammad wa aḥlām al-Inssān al-Māqhūr” in Nāqd wa Ibdāʿ. (“Sami Mohammad and the Dreams of the Oppressed” in Criticism and Creativity). Al-Dār al-Miṣriyya wa al-Lūbnāniyya, Cairo.

Ghānīm, Aḥmad. 1985. “Sami Moḥammad: Nāḥḥāt al-Jīl al-ʿArābī al-Shāqī” (Sami Mohammad: Sculptor of the Unfortunate Arab Generation). Al-Watān Newspaper, August 25, no. 3780.

Hunāydi, ʿAmer, Sūlāymān al-ʿAskārī, Sultān Sūʿūd al-Qāsīmī, Ḍiyʾ ʿAzzāwī, Bahaʾ Abūdeyyā, Māymānā Fārāḥāt, ʿAbd al-Qādīrī. Sami Mohammad: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalog. Arabic and English. Kuwait: Contemporary Art Platform, 2015.

Khāzʿāl, Ḥāmīd. 1995. “Al-Nāḥḥāt al-Kuwaytī Sami Moḥammad Yansūjū bī Rū’yā ʿAṣrīyā” (The Sculptor Sami Mohammad Weaves with a Contemporary Vision). Mājāllāt al-Kuwayt, February, no. 136.

Mohāmed, Shehnilla. 1994. “Protest of An Artist.” Gulf Weekly, 14-21 December.

Moḥammad, Ānwer. 2007.” Fī A’māl Sami Moḥammad lā Qīmā li-l-Fārāgh min Dūn Inssān” (In the Works of Sami Mohammad, Space is Valueless without the Human). Mājāllāt al-Kuwayt, June, no. 284.

Sami Moḥammad. 1987. “Ābḥāthū ʿan al-Jāmāl fi al-Bāshāʿā.” (I Search for Beauty in the Ugly). Interview by Ṣāfā Ṣānkūr. Mājāllāt Kūl al-ʿArāb (Paris), August 12.

———. Art of Sami Mohammed. Arabic and English. Kuwait: al-Khat Press,1994.

———. 2004. Byūtūnā Kānāt min al-Tīn . . wa Kānāt al-Bīdāyā’’ (We lived in Mud Houses . . . And It Was The Beginning). Interview by Fayṣal al-ʿAli. Mājāllāt al-Bāyān, April, no. 405.

———. 2001. “Tāḥawwālā al-qālāq ʿEndī ilā Ḥiss Wūjūdī” (Anxiety In Me Has Transformed into an Existentialist Sensibility). Interview by Shemlūnī, Haythām. al-Khālīj al-Thāqāfī, July, no. 8086.

——— Sami Mohammad and The Age of Affliction. Arabic and English. Kuwait: s.n. ca. 2015.

——— Sami Mohammad & Inks in the Age of Fright & Destruction. Arabic and English. Kuwait: s.n. ca. 2017.

——— Sami Mohammad and The Preoccupation with Freedom. Arabic and English. Kuwait: s.n. ca. 2017.

——— Ṣāḥrāwiyāt (Desert-Derived). Arabic and English. Kuwait: s.n. 2022.

——— Sami Mohammad and Tightening the Ligaments. Arabic and English. Kuwait: s.n. ca. 2017.

Roy, Chaitali B. 2015. “Sami Mohammad’s works symbolise ‘everyman’” Arab Times, January 22.

Shāhīn, Maḥmūd. 2008. “Sami Moḥammad: Fannān Ḥrrākā al-Ṭīn Ṭāfūlātāhu” (Sami Mohammad: An Artist Whose Childhood was Modelled by Clay). Mājāllāt al-Kuwayt December, no. 302.

Tilal Gallery. Sami Mohammad. s.n. 2011. Exhibition catalogue.

Unknown author: Sami Mohammad: Displacement. Exhibition catalog. Kuwait: Contemporary Art Platform, 2019.

Multimedia

Al-Akhbār TV (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz9IyhBH-18

Al-Bawadi TV (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59Vl18wgGQI

Apache Film Productions (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j99DU7OwBnw

Al-Qabas TV (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb2AZ-Cm9kc

ATV (2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92F4UT1n1q8

Khāzʿāl, Ḥāmīd (1987): https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/142/21590/492196

Kuwait TV (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y608deRyzoI

Māymānā Fārāḥāt (2015): https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/31872

Moḥammad Al-Mulla (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SZLjHoN0PY

Sami Moḥammad (2010): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKgOWE7uHdA

Sami Moḥammad (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeN2KnhUCoI

Instagram Account of Sami Mohammad: https://www.instagram.com/samimohammadart/?hl=ar

Sultān al-Qāsīmī ( 2016): https://sultanalqassemi.com/videos/sami-mohammed-penetration-sculpture/

Further Readings

Al-Baqṣāmi, Thurayā. Al-Mārsām al-Ḥurr wa Riḥlāt 25 ‘Amān (The Free Atelier and Its Journey of 25 Years). Ministry of Information. Kuwait, 1986.

Al-Fārāj, Sūʿūd. “Al- Māʿraḍ al-Shamil li-l-Fannānīn al-Kūwaytīyyīn” (The All-Inclusive Art Exhibition of Kuwaiti Artists). March 1, 2003. Jarīdāt al-Fūnūn, no 27. Online AlSharekh Archives. https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/260/18848/426336

Al-Zāʿābī, Zāʿābī. “Al-Fann al-Kuwaytī al-Muʿāṣer wa Maṣādūrūhū al-Tūrāthiyyā wa al-Iqlīmīyya (Contemporary Kuwait Artists and Their Heritage-Based and Regional Resources). July 1, 2001. Jarīdāt al-Fūnūn, no 7. Online AlSharekh Archives. https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/260/18829/425827

Ḥāmīdā, Ḥāmid. “Māʿraḍ al-Fann bi-l-Kuwayt ʿĀmm 1961: Fann wa” Fannānūn (The 1961 General Art Exhibition in Kuwait: Art and Artists). October 1, 1961. Mājāllāt al-ʿArābī, no 35. Online AlSharekh Archives. https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/142/14381/320351

Merry, Bruce. 2005. “Tradition, Technique . . . Our Times on Canvas.” Arab Times, July 19.

Nāṣif, Mūnīr. “Al-Fann wa al-Fannānūn fi al-Kuwayt” (Art and Artists in Kuwait). July 1, 1967. Mājāllāt al-ʿArābī, no 104. Online AlSharekh Archives. https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/142/14451/322699

Ṣālmān, ʿĀbdūlrāssūl. Bīdāyāt Masīrāt al-Fann al-Tashkīli fil Kuwayt (Beginning of the Kuwaiti Visual Art Journey). Kuwait: Kuwait Government Press, 1975.

Yelī, Ṣādiq. “Līqā al-Fann al-Tashkīli al-ʿArābī fi al-Kuwayt” (Arab Formative Art Meeting in Kuwait). July 1, 1979. Mājāllāt al-ʿArābī, no 248. Online AlSharekh Archives. https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/142/21470/488545