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Tamara Al Samerraei
Born in Kuwait in 1977, Tamara Al-Samerraei is a painter who lives and works in Beirut. She received a BA in Fine Arts from the Lebanese American University in Beirut in 2002 and com- pleted the inaugural year of the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan (2011-2012), Beirut. Her solo exhibitions include Promise You Made, Marfa’, Beirut (2023); Outland, Le Centre Inter- mondes, La Rochelle (2022); What Floats in Space, Marfa’ Projects, Beirut (2019); Let Me Stay a Little Longer, Marfa’ Projects, Beirut (2015-2016); Make Room for Me, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2014); Fleet- ing Fences (2011) and Something White (2008), Agial Art Gallery, Beirut.
She has participated in several group and duo exhibitions including ‘Intimate Garden Scene (In Beirut), Ashkal Alwan Homeworks 9, Sursock Mu- seum, Beirut(2024); The Cheating Hand of Ran- domness, Gypsum, Cairo (2021)Fondu Re-Enca- hine, L’Atlas Galerie des Mondes, Paris (2022); Hospitalités-FIAC, InSitu Fabienne Leclerc, Paris (2020); Heavenly Beings:Neiter Human Nor An- imal, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, +MSUM,Ljubljan(2018); Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbours, MAXXI museum, Rome (2017); Tamawuj-Sharjah Biennial13, Sharjah (2017); Play The Possum, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2016); On Water,Rosemary and Mercury in Homeworks 7, Beirut (2015)
“Open Studio” includes works by Tamara Al-Samerraei that expand on her practice that explores; memory, absence and the emotional landscapes of everyday spaces.
Over the past five years, Al-Samerraei has turned geopgraphically different spaces, into makeshift studios. These temporary dwellings become subjects in the artist’s paintings, they are depicted in use, or empty, scattered with unfinished work and traces of past works on their walls. She reproduces traces of what remains from a past life and a precarious working space.
In these shifting states, Tamara Al-Samerraei also finds herself drawn to abandoned, hut-like structures that feel oddly familiar, like ghosts of the perfect house she had imagined as a child. The artist is trying to reconstruct her connection to that childhood vision of home. She is doing a sort of seance, using photography as a medium. Al-Samerraei started creating drawings and paintings from photos she has taken and others she has seen through the eyes of absent lovers.
The process of making these works is fluid and shifting. She moves between photography, drawing, painting, and three-dimensional forms, reflecting the back-and-forth between familiarity and alienation in the artist’s search for what "home" means during transitory periods of displacement.
