Exhibition Details

Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present Immortal Moment II - Coping with the Shock, a solo exhibition featuring Faisal Samra’s recent body of work.   This exhibition showcases the second body of work from the Immortal Moment project, in which Samra creates artworks through the accumulation of instances, pushing the viewer to question the opportunities of a single moment. In the first chapter of this project, Samra describes the technique as capturing a moment and immortalizing it in time through gestural performances, serving as an expression of emotions. However, now, he defines the outcome as a 'shock'. This exhibition will reveal the process of 'Coping with the Shock'.
While the concept of fight or flight is thoroughly examined in the fields of medicine and psychology, Samra introduces a novel conceptualisation of it through his artistic practice. At a moment of shock, either the moment dominates and controls us, or we absorb and adapt to it, metamorphosing into a new form. To survive and overcome the shock is what we call coping. In the spirit of fight, the artist intervenes post gesture to cope with what chance and the laws of physics produce. The study of the improvised creation allows the artist to seek meaning within the abstraction. Therefore creating post-shock creatures and figures. In a meditative process, the summation of dots and splashes of the colour amount to what the artist is looking for. Ultimately, this artistic endeavour becomes an endless cycle of documentation, acts, and gestures that trace time and immortalise it, one overcoming the other.
The cyclic timeline in capturing the essence of moments is evident in his concepts and the evolution of his artistic practice. In the Distorted Reality series (2005/2011), Samra chose a moment from countless stills of filmed performances. In the subsequent project, Thriving Emotions - Immortal Moment the artist identifies the moment before anything else. The emphasis lay on the emotion conveyed through the spontaneous act of creating marks. The Immortal Moment project comes to a full circle in this exhibition: through gestural mark-making, Samra restructures the singular moment of action to birth a new series of moments to establish control amidst the unpredictable. The dialogue between the abstract and figurative, conceptually or formalistically, is essential to Samra’s work. Time, being one of the most abstract ideas becomes figurative when Samra visually notes down specific points in time through the use of charcoal and paint. The result is formalistically abstract, but the final creation becomes figurative through several interventions, which represent a culmination of temporal instances.