From painting murals of Saddam Hussein to shaking up Blenheim Palace

    Against all the odds, the marriage of Mohammed Sami and Blenheim Palace turns out to be made in heaven. It’s against the odds because Sami is a 40-year-old from Baghdad who has ended up in London while Blenheim is a particularly posh and gigantic stately home, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, the birthplace of Winston Churchill and the place they filmed Bridgerton. Yet look how well artist and location get on.

    Sami is here because Blenheim has a contemporary art wing that mounts probing shows. It’s part of an effort to attract a younger audience to the palace — the oldies flocking to the annual game fair won’t live for ever. But Blenheim, with its towering old masters, looming columns and overpowering history is a challenging location for contemporary art. It takes artistic cunning to survive these impactful surroundings. Sami has tons of it.

    It’s almost the only clear thing about him. His paintings are a shadowy mix of figuration and abstraction. Subtle and mysterious, they give up their meanings slowly. At Blenheim they are scattered about the plush interiors and pop up unexpectedly. Thus the fun of a treasure hunt has been appropriated for an event that ends up taking us somewhere very dark.

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    It starts in the Great Hall where, in 1716, Sir James Thornhill painted a pompous military allegory in which the 1st Duke of Marlborough pretends to be Mars, the god of war, while Fame blows her trumpet at him. The duke had previously triumphed at the Battle of Blenheim and Thornhill’s aerial expanse of wonky baroque art is paying tribute to that victory.

    In an adjacent alcove, Sami reacts to this baroque nonsense with an eerie top view of what appears to be a military location picked out on a satellite chart, with the shadow of dark helicopter blades falling on it. Or is a ceiling fan casting shadows on a map? As always with Sami, we can’t be sure.

    The shadowy map immediately tugged my memory back to TV sights I remember from the Iraq war: missile attacks that felt like video games; flickering satellite views of Iraqi targets; incoming jets and American voices. Sami is comparing the aerial warfare he lived through with Thornhill’s clunky battle fantasy suspended high above the ground next door.

    From here on, his work inveigles itself into Blenheim’s history with a chess player’s sneakiness. Thus a room filled with the fabulous Meissen porcelain that Augustus III, King of Poland, gave to the 3rd Duke of Marlborough (as thanks for “a pack of staghounds”) climaxes with a painting in which someone has dropped a plate, and a mop is cleaning up the mess: broken china; red walls; a dirty floor.

    But wait. Is that blood being mopped up, not tomato soup? Is that really the handle of a mop, because it looks a lot like the barrel of the gun? Who would drop a plate in a room full of priceless Meissen? A celebration of rococo crockery has become a spooky premonition of war.

    Not content with smuggling his own dark subject matter into the Blenheim party, Sami is also impressively skilled at fitting in. Most often at these forced unions of old and new — a rising trend in venerable institutions seeking to get down with the kids — the contemporary art is shown up by the old stuff and looks glaringly out of place. Not here.

    In the mop picture, the red wallpaper is mimicking the wallpaper of the Red Drawing Room that lies ahead. A painting called Chandelier, 2024 shows on the wall a block of chipboard of the kind used to shut up broken shop windows. But there’s a shadow falling on it: the shadow of the ornate chandelier hanging in the middle of the room. It’s another of Sami’s painted shadows.

    This skilful trompe l’oeil detailing isn’t the only thing that ensures a smooth passage here between the art and its surroundings. There are also clever colour schemes that continue the subterfuge. Joseph’s Coat is a subfusc and seemingly abstract painting, tall, thin and reddish, which the caption tells us refers to the Bible story of Joseph’s coat of many colours. After a bit of staring you do indeed begin to discern the outline of a body under the bloodied cloth. But what really works is the way Sami’s melancholy vision sits so naturally between the heavy Blenheim curtains that surround it. It’s such a clever pictorial strategy: to involve the whole room in your meanings.

    What’s really happening here is that Sami is summoning up the ghosts of his Iraqi past. Born into a family of nine siblings in Baghdad, he lived through the Iran/Iraq conflict, the Gulf war, the 2003 invasion by allied forces including the UK, and all the turmoil that followed. As an artist, his first job was painting heroic murals of Saddam Hussein. In 2007 he was granted asylum in Sweden and finally arrived in Britain with a place at Belfast School of Art.

    This dark history is branded into his DNA. You see it most obviously in a huge cityscape that, for once, looms up unmissably in the middle of a room and shows the outlines of a mosque in Baghdad, seemingly bathed in the warm evening light of a Middle Eastern sunset. Till you look harder. And recognise the yellow light as a furious desert storm of sand engulfing Baghdad. And those zigzag patterns in the grass — those are tank tracks.

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    This is a sneaky artistic campaign against war, destruction and the behaviour of the west. The bellicose history of the Marlboroughs is being criticised with wicked subtlety by a cunning and emotional artistic intelligence.

    Elsewhere on the treasure hunt, the finely armoured soldiers of the Marlborough line are recurringly compared with heavily medalled Iraqi generals who have lost their heads. Even Churchill gets dragged into the artistic war game with a black silhouette that is obviously him, but looks as if it had been burnt to an outline in a fire bombing.

    By inviting Sami into their palace, the ghosts of the Marlboroughs have set a serpent free in their bedroom. And, boy, is he having fun biting them.

    Mohammed Sami is at Blenheim Palace to October 6