Samira Abbassy - Of Loss and Redemption

Fire is another dominant motif. In works such as The Water Bearers, it functions as a physical, psychological, and even geopolitical force. Disembodied heads hover above the scene, blowing and sustaining the flames, evoking omniscient powers, systems of authority, mass communication, and ideological control, shaping our lives from above. In this tension between the remote and the immediate, Abbassy stages a drama of agency. A question emerges… what does it means to act, to remain human, in the face of these overwhelming forces?

Women dominate throughout. They appear repeatedly, whether as carriers of water, of grief, of knowledge, or of continuity. Far from passive, Abbassy’s women absorb and accommodate chaos and devastation. In line with her use of allegorical symbols, Abbassy feels these women reflect an archetypal reality rather than a political slogan. After all, isn’t it always the women who must carry the consequences of conflict and loss, who must hold communities together and rebuild others and their own lives after catastrophe? In Of Loss and Redemption, they are neither idealized nor sentimentalized but rendered with quiet resilience and strength.

The recurrence of multiple heads, whether attached to bodies, animals, or disarticulated, rolling across the picture plane, points directly to the Jungian framework that underpins much of Abbassy’s thinking. Drawing on Jung’s conception of the ‘Self’ as plural rather than singular, these heads might represent the continuous shedding and accumulation of identity. The Self, in this view, is not a unified whole but a chorus: shaped by genetic memory, experience, and transformation over time. Loss, here, is not only destructive, but also constitutive. Loss can make space for renewal and reconfiguration.

Abbassy’s relationship to religious iconography and art history is similarly intuitive and non-linear. Throughout the exhibition, references to Christian imagery, Islamic iconography, Persian symbolism and Sufi literature emerge. For example, the use of fire encircling a head recalls both the halo of medieval Christian art and the flames surrounding the Prophet in Islamic imagery. The peacock, which appearing in several works here, such as In the Land of Peacocks, carries alchemical associations of endurance and transformation. The peacock, Abbassy says, is said to metabolize poison into iridescence, turning suffering into radiance. Abbassy has noted that this symbolism speaks to the possibility of transmutation rather than transcendence – a process of becoming through endurance, rather than escaping from pain.

Many of the paintings are executed on wood, deliberately recalling the material structure of icons. Abbassy frequently scrapes back through layers of paint to reveal the gesso beneath, allowing light to emerge from the surface itself rather than being applied from paint. This technique reinforces a recurring conceptual concern: illumination comes from within.

Works on paper offer a parallel but distinct tonal shift. More immediate and graphic, the two drawings in this exhibition foreground line, gesture, and residue. Abbassy allows erasures, revisions, and traces of decision-making to remain visible, treating them not as mistakes but as evidence of thought in motion. Multiplying hands or limbs becomes a way of representing time within a static image. It touches on the pre-Renaissance strategy of showing movement and duration that Abbassy adapts to her own symbolic ends.

Like poetry, these works operate through resonance rather than resolution. They ask viewers not to decode, but to dwell, to recognize something familiar yet unnamed, something that speaks across cultures, histories, and belief systems.

Of Loss and Redemption finds a context within which hybridity, translation, and layered identity each play a part. In an era marked by fragmentation and upheaval, these paintings insist on a deeper continuity - one rooted not in ideology, but in shared psychic and emotional experience.