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Samira Abbassy is a scavenger of untold truths. We once spent an afternoon together in an old American town. In the 1780s, the port of Salem was bigger than Boston and was the place from which America had its first exchanges with India and China. So, after plundering old antique shops, Samira emerged smiling, arms laden with hidden histories.
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Abbassy’s is a world of interiority. Characters inhabit a psychological space, which beckons by holding up a mirror. Her paintings are populated by female figures, appearing as amalgamations of mothers, daughters and repeating fragments of our own selves. Landscapes are articulated by richly patterned fabrics, butterflies, birds and thick hair that coils around necks or muzzled mouths. Sometimes a loaded gun rises in a shadowy half-light, signaling Beware! Something here needs to be taken note of: Abbassy is calling all the different parts of Samira back to herself. She told me:
…It all started with my grandmother’s hair…when I was 12 in Ahwaz one time
she showed me under her headscarf. Thin braids of her hair, made all orange
by henna, were coiled up around her ears. My grandmother’s hair would
become like an umbilicus in my own work, connecting me to her story and
the stories of other mothers. I can cut you off but you will keep coming back.
So, swallowing a braid is like swallowing the impossible; you can cut my
braid but it will reappear and it will always belong
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Her grandmother’s interior life became totemic of other unseen stories across her larger practice: her hidden hair, tattoos and a tobacco tin from which she rolled her own cigarettes. Her grandmother showed her things her own mother never could, as she became caught between England and Iran.
Abbassy’s paintings are poised with stillness. Like the silent cinema of sleep when, safe in our beds, our unconscious taps at portals usually kept closed as if to say: look, this part of me remains left to be heard. The effect is like a medieval icon shimmering with the patina of past lives.
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Samira Abbassy was born to Arab Iranians in 1965, who left for England when she was two. Living outside London, she felt her otherness keenly and was caught between the strictures of being a Muslim girl at home and something else she was yet to discover as she made her way in the world. She studied painting at Canterbury College of Art and enjoyed early shows in London before moving to Manhattan where she would develop her practice over 30 years. The Chemical Hysterical series, a set of large charcoal drawings developed over 10 years, was my first encounter with Abbassy as a curator at the British Museum nearly 20 years ago now. So I've been a groupie for a long time and have watched her hand ask searching questions of herself and therefore also of us.
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Everyone is born on a fault line, if only they knew it. After reading Salman Rushdie’s “Imaginary Homelands”, I realised once you’ve left a place it becomes a kind of Never Never Land. So I became a “fictional historian,” reinterpreting stories about a place I barely knew.
Abbassy’s work is alive with polyphony, like a Homeric journey rippling with refrain and speaking to a cross cultural pollination spanning different art historical registers and intersectionalities. These are the kinds of questions Abbassy grapples and confronts in her inimitable Jungian approach to the shadow selves. Her work asks what the body remembers, even if the waking mind diverts it. How do we hold onto our authentic selves despite external forces exerted upon us?
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I can’t stage manage my process, it leads me. I am not telling you the story; I am the story, which becomes totemic and bleeds into other stories, as in our memories and dreams. The painting is flat because the figure is not in the painting but in my psyche.I understand narrative to be a set of relationships built up in the making of the painting. When there is more than one figure, their relationship becomes the story. Even if there is only one figure, a story emerges about who and what this figure represents. The internal dynamics of the figure becomes the narrative.
Abbassy actions the inside and outside of her protagonists in a Joycean multivalent storytelling that creates an echoing experience. The Surrealists spring to mind as well, a movement which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious amid an apparently irrational juxtaposition of images. Amalgamating drawn forms with Qajar colours, thick braids, amid flames from Tibetan thangkas, or skulls and limbs from the Hindu goddess Kali who never seeks permission to simply Be. All kinds of disparate iconographies are woven into her work.
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Representing many aspects of a single self emerged from fourteenth century hagiographies where the saint appears many times, charting his journey in the landscape or on a pilgrimage. Abbassy uses this idea of multiples of ‘the Self’ to express psychodynamic realities of the human figure.
These quiet works speak strongly to transcendence and becoming. Butterflies and birds have long represented ideas around the resurrected soul, transmutation and flight, symbols unburdened by material constraint, they are released from the body to ultimate freedom. Our waking world is defended by ego but Abbassy’s interior one is shorn of ego and so overflows with vulnerability. This is what disarms and so touches us.
I've come to terms with being a woman. I was the middle girl, which was the most expendable thing to be in an Arab Iranian Muslim family.
Samira Abbassy has transformed loss into an expansive horizon.
November 2024
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Samira Abbassy (b.1965, Ahwaz, Iran) is based in New York. Abbassy emigrated to London UK in 1967, studied at the Canterbury College of Art before moving to New York City to co-found the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in 1998, where her studio is based and holds a lifetime tenure position. Abbassy’s work has been shown at the Metropolitan, the British Museum, LACMA and the 26th Venice Biennial. Abbassy’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including: the Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, British Government Art Collection, Grey Art Gallery at NYU, Burger Collection, Donald Rubin collection, Los Angeles County Museum, Afkhami Collection and Brattleboro Museum VT. Her fellowships include: Yaddo in 2006, 2022 and 2024, and Saltonstall in 2017, two NYFA awards: 2007 in drawing and 2018 in painting, a Joan Mitchell in 2010 and a Pollock-Krasner in 2014, and nominated for Anonymous Was a Woman in 2018.
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Dr Sona Datta is a curator, writer and broadcaster. After a decade at the British Museum, she became head of South Asian art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts. She has written widely on artists from the Global South and her numerous broadcast projects include Treasures of the Indus (BBC). Her next book resets the lens on the so-called ‘East’ (Seeing India, Bloomsbury 2026). Sona is a 2020 Clore Leadership Fellow and Honorary Research Fellow at City, University of London.
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SAMIRA ABBASSY'S CV HERE
Samira Abbassy: I Am the Story
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