Sam Samiee (Tehran)

Adab: Collecting within Chaos

Lecture-Performance

Synopsis: “The painter’s attention was collected in the reflection of her beauty, As he reached the hair flock, at last, he painted chaos.”
– King Mohammad Dara Shokuh

The artist’s research into psychoanalysis, Manichaeism, and the Persian code of conduct, Adab, collects, reconstructs, and resignifies epistemic frames of mind for navigation through time and space. Samiee claims that psychoanalysis, a climate of ideas rooted in psychology, is the only robust Neoplatonist discourse in the Western world. Manichaeism, a lost religion made up of a shared history stretching from Britain to Southeast China, is the origin of much of Sufi and mystic literature and art, while the Adab is a modus operandi that collects through the negation and negotiation of the aesthetic-ethical plane. Such produced prehistory is a framework through which both Samiee’s painting and curatorial practice may be contextualized.

Sam Samiee’s FIELD MEETING participation is supported by Dastan Gallery (Tehran).

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Sam Samiee is a painter and essayist with a background in Persian literature, art history, and psychoanalysis. Samiee dedicates a majority of his time studying the many different histories and theories about painting and actively practices them against each other. In his most recent exhibitions, Love Got Lost(displaced), Intellect fallen after i at Gemeentemuseum the Hague, and Unfinished Copernican Revolution’ at Berlin Biennale X, Samiee presented his paintings alongside readings of the psychoanalytic revision of Seduction Theory of Laplanche with other international forms of literature in attempts to reinstall the canon of art history.