Santa Monica Museum of Art presents in Project Room 2 “Samira Yamin: We Will Not Fail”

SANTA MONICA, CA.- Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Samira Yamin: We Will Not Fail, the artist’s debut solo museum exhibition. The exhibition is on view from January 19 through April 20, 2013 in the Museum’s Project Room 2.

We Will Not Fail revolves around the October 1, 2001 issue of TIME magazine, the first instance of Osama Bin Laden on the magazine’s cover and the first issue dedicated entirely to the “war on terror.” In this body of work, Yamin meticulously hand cuts Islamic geometric patterns into photographs of Middle Eastern subjects. In this context, portraits of presumed Arab insurgents, American soldiers serving abroad, local civilians, and architectural structures are simultaneously defaced and embellished by Islamic traditional motifs. Yamin’s hand-cut latticework repeats geometries that, in Islamic culture, represent the underlying and infinite structure of the universe. The patterns evoke both the decorative and the divine.

Samira Yamin attends the Santa Monica Museum of Art Winter Exhibition Openings in Santa Monica, Calif. Photo by John Shearer/Invision for SMMoA/AP Images.

Exquisite in design and subversive in content, the works in We Will Not Fail hold aesthetic beauty and terror in precarious tension. In this exhibition, the October 1, 2001 issue of TIME magazine is installed in multiple formats. It is displayed in its entirety like an illuminated manuscript uncannily floating in a transparent vitrine. Four additional excised articles are framed and hung individually on the surrounding gallery walls.

Who is the implied “We” in the exhibition We Will Not Fail? Is the “We” intended to vocalize a Western position or might the “We” champion cultural perspectives from the Arab lands? Yamin’s aesthetic interventions physically and metaphorically question the legibility of media images; they turn seemingly nationalistic binaries into a multi-layered conversation. Carved into the pages of TIME, Yamin’s work transfigures and reinterprets journalistic representations of war. Quite literally, her interventions puncture existing narratives, question the production of news, and initiate a nuanced relationship between the sacred and the profane, beauty and terror, and the United States and the Middle East.

Samira Yamin was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1983. She received a dual BA in studio art and sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Yamin lives and works in Los Angeles.