Artist Samir Mahmood looks beyond identity categories, addressing broad ideas around time, society, power and pleasure writes Séan Kissane
Artist Samir Mahmood, whose primary education was as a medical doctor, overlays onto the art-historical a clinico-anatomical understanding of the body as an assemblage of interrelated systems in flux. ‘Symplegmatic Portals’ is the title of a body of work by Mahmood shown at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, and Rampa in Porto in 2025, both curated by Miguel Amado. The term is a neologism coined by the artist that contains concepts pertinent to his process. A symplegma in art-historical terminology is an image of tightly interwoven bodies, sometimes suggesting erotic entanglement. It has been applied to images of wrestlers, predators killing prey, and metamorphosis. The addition of ‘portal’, a gate or passageway, introduces a temporal and spatial dimension.
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