Tasneem Sarkez's heady mix of kitsch, Arabic and Americana hits London

When she’s in London, the artist Tasneem Sarkez makes a habit of visiting Edgware Road, variously described as ‘Little Cairo’ or ‘Little Beirut’ towards the south, owing to its vast collection of Middle Eastern joints (a product of migration that stretches back to the Ottoman Empire). On a recent trip to the capital, for the opening of her debut solo show at Rose Easton gallery, Sarkez added Knightsbridge to her itinerary on the advice of her gallerist. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Dubai,’ she offers, adding that she seeks out similar neighourhoods whenever she travels. ‘It’s about finding the different parallels, and the patterns I’m interested in within my work, just looking at the motifs that are present.’

Based in New York, Sarkez was born in 2002 to Libyan parents living in Portland. Her preoccupation with the familiar and the aesthetically curious began young, she reflects, with her magpie-type tendencies meaning she was ‘always looking for things, constantly scanning the room’. On a trip to Libya last year, her first in 12 years, she purchased some henna stencils, solely for the photoshopped image on the packet: her studio is filled with objects acquired for similar attributes. It’s these – as well as images she finds online and photographs she takes on her phone – that form the basis of her all work (she's a bibliophile and Pascal Ménoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt is another big influence).

With White-Knuckle at Rose Easton, Sarkez leans into the ‘Arab kitsch’ aesthetic she has come to inhabit since beginning in the industry. First arriving at the phrase in an article online, she’s since reconciled the problematic potential of the words with the fact that kitsch is universally observed. In The Real Superhero Key, for example, she taps into vivid Americana, while elsewhere G-Class dance with the Shah looks at the military origins of a Mercedes-Benz model, and First Lady is a nod to Muammar Gaddaffi’s female bodyguards, dubbed the ‘amazons’ by Western press. ‘[Sarkez] paints a lurid picture of the central role amusement plays in politics and public discourse,’ notes Ruba Al-Sweel in a text that accompanies the show. ‘She looks at the way absurd scenarios congeal into metanarratives and canonical images that organise society.’

‘I arrived at oil painting with this idea of making what I want to see, because it's not there,’ says the artist, speaking on her affinity for the medium (two sculptures depicting perfume bottles, a reference to Brooklyn’s beauty shops, also feature in the new show). ‘It's adding the images I see to the art historical canon that is painting, through contemporary still lifes.’ Over Zoom, Sarkez uses a key ring analogy to highlight the way the personal meets the political in her work, suggesting that while there’s always a Sarah and Tom in the gift shop, there’s never a Tasneem. ‘Where are these contemporary signifiers, objects or patterns of identity? Ruba calls [my work] “algorithmic still lifes”, and I do think about composing my paintings in a way that’s very calculated with language and composition, and these more formal elements like traditional painting. It's under that pretense that it makes my name expected.’

In Good Evening, which features a white car with shadows and flashes, and the greeting ‘mah-sah al-khair’ written in Arabic over a back wheel, Sarkez examines the role of modern multimedia and how different cultures and generations navigate it. A counterpart to Good Morning, which appeared in an earlier show with Rose Easton (a further piece, Good Night, will follow at her upcoming show with Romance in Pittsburgh in May 2025), the series is based on the sparkly gifs shared by the artist’s mum and other parents from the diaspora or living outside of the US and Europe, habitually used as a vehicle for affection. ‘On WhatsApp and Viber, all these apps of communication across continents, there's this genre of imagery that's just so good. It’s common amongst people of colour, and it’s very camp. I love the simpleness, the sweetness [of the message],’ says Sarkez. ‘And to paint it in Arabic rather than English, is a kind of visual ode to the language. People don't grant Arabic that same visual “safety”, we've villainised the language, so that decision was to kind of say, “it's just saying good morning”.’

Furthermore, apparent across her practice is the way Sarkez employs tensions (perhaps the most telling property of the kitsch she embraces), and with ‘White-Knuckle’ that manifests via combined irony and seriousness, and concurrent feminine and masculine qualities. The show’s moniker, in particular, carries multiple readings. ‘I looked up vocabulary related to the experience of driving, because I wanted to mirror that interest within my work, but more abstract,’ Sarkez shares. ‘That term, white-knuckle, like gripping a steering wheel super tight, comes from a place of excitement but also anxiety, and that tension I thought was perfect for the show. There was also something funny in having the word “white”, at a visual level, occupy a show that doesn't necessarily touch on whiteness. It’s kind of tongue in cheek.’

Tasneem Sarkez's debut solo show, 'White-Knuckle', is at Rose Easton until 1 March 2025

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