KASSEL.- In his new body of work Hostless, Mohammed Sami focuses predominantly on internal spaces. The paintings become a site for mnemonic processes, mental operations in which abstraction falters and something unsettling begins to seep through. Rooms become spectral containers, holding the residue of events that agreed to stay unnamed despite of the availability of the crime evidence. These interiors are literal in their unease yet evasive in meaning, trembling with a physicality that painting, as a practice, refuses to fully define or contain. Objects behave as floating signifiers, denoting an absent violence or a memory made consumable only through distance. The formal language in his new paintings allow the ‘horror’ to become an optional element for viewers, not performed, but quietly endured, revealed through the stubborn materiality of what remains.
The Fridericianum presents the first institutional exhibition of Sami’s work in Germany. It is being realized in cooperation with the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent and Moderna Museet Malm, which will present the artist’s work in 2027 and 2028.
Sami has previously had critically acclaimed solo exhibitions at KM21 in The Hague (2025), Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (2025), Blenheim Art Foundation in Woodstock (2024), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (2024), Camden Art Centre in London (2023), and De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea (2023). He has participated in group exhibitions at, among others, Moderna Museet Stockholm (2026), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2025), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2024), Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (2022), Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya (2022), and Whitechapel Gallery in London (2022). His paintings are held in numerous international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Muse National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Tate in London. For his exhibition After the Storm at the Blenheim Art Foundation, he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2025.
On the occasion of the exhibition Hostless, the Fridericianum, in cooperation with the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) and Moderna Museet Malm, will publish a monograph on the artist.
Curatorial team: Justin Michael Delor, Luise von Nobbe & Moritz Wesseler
