“I’ve never seen myself as a conventional person”
Faisal Samra is Saudi Arabia’s best-known contemporary artist and has exhibited widely in France, the USA and throughout the Middle East. Following his BA at L’Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris, in 1975 and a spell teaching at the College of Fine Art in Jordan between 2003-4 he now resides and works in Bahrain.
Samra’s contribution to ‘Edge of Arabia’, Distorted Reality, is a series of performances recorded using digital photographs, computer graphics and video. There is an emphasis on theatre, dressing-up and a need to move away from conventional narrative arcs. In many ways this, his latest body of work represents yet another departure from his artistic past: his oeuvre is dominated by such ‘breaks’.
The triptychs in Distorted Reality relate separate instances from a series of actions performed by Samra. In a formal sense they are reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s legendary triptychs. Each performance is unscripted, with no contrived start or finish, and together they form part of Samra’s polemic against what he calls the ‘made-up images’ of advertising and globalised news media. His desire throughout is to present the viewer with images that are rigorously unmediated.
