Premio Combat Prize

Mohammad Salemy has written on the ’Bedroom Posters’ : ”Rather than being merely a collection of paintings and objects, Samiee’s Installation ought to be regarded as a single painting. The topology of the spatialized universe of the artist’s painted surface is a unitary atmosphere – one which is not simply constructed from a set of integrated colours and shapes but which also proposes an original concept of culture, a proposition that constitutes the core of his practice. Samiee’s work is the synthesis of the history of Western painting and the artist’s focused research on Persian *Adab*, a word which in Persian stands for the double concepts of ethics and aesthetics. Samiee has been meticulously constructing a theoretical prehistory for his painting practice out of the Persian literary legacy of the past millennium as it relates to the core concepts of contemporary psychoanalysis. To navigate the space of Samiee’s painting, the viewer is obliged to break away from contemporary art’s reliance on a singular lens, be it the history of Avant-grade, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, or social and political issues and instead combine them to arrive at the implications of the work. From a purely pictorial point of view, Samiee’s return to the 9th century and the founding of Farsi as the first truly Persian language after the Arab invasion in 700 BC coincides with the emergence of painting as a crucial technology for the communication of metaphysics in the West. Thus Samiee’s break from the tradition of flat painting is a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. By breaking away from the flat geometry as the link between the actual and virtual in painting, the artist reconstructs a new heterodimensional space out of the possibilities offered by the gallery, proposing a new existential role for the future of painting as the visual and experiential dimension of thought.”
I have finished recently the two years program of Rijksakademie, with a major in painting from AKI, Netherlands and University of Art, Tehran. Though my background falls into mathematics, literature, psychoanalysis and design. From question of sexuality, to the relationship of ethics to aesthetics, with a comparative approach between Islam and Judeo-Christian world makes the landscape in which I like to wander and question.