Samar Al Summary

Samar Al Summary is a Saudi American visual artist and writer. She did not discover art in a museum or in school. Art became a necessity to her during a difficult time in her life when financial instability liquidated all security and her family became homeless. Using her fingers to frame a perfect composition in everyday life brought a sense of order and solidity, even when her possessions were lost. Her practice examines those who are guilty by association; those who were being used as tools by the culprit, while they thought of themselves as idle bystanders. Samar Al Summary has photographed the traces of readers in books, seeing them as examples of how witnessing can become a crime against memory. She has filmed and preserved the ephemeral security footage from museums where visitors do not know that by visiting art they consent to be made into art themselves. She photographed and filmed parked cars, which are often accused of destroying the landscape, as they are boiled alive by the sun, and through that martyrdom, becoming similar to the ravaged land.

Samar Al Summary’s photography was featured in the Winter 2020 Aperture edition “Utopia,” part of an article on Arab photography ten years after the Arab spring. In Summer 2021, she participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop. She recently completed the Home Workspace Educational Art Residency in Beirut, Lebanon 2019–2020. Her essay, "Passenger as flaneur," was published by Well Gedacht in 2021. In Spring 2021, Samar Al Summary had her first solo show in London at the POC-led Harlesden High Street Gallery.