Open Studios: Tamara Al-Samerraei and Ghyzlène Boukaïla

Al-Samerraei presents new paintings that expand on her ongoing explorations of memory, absence, and the emotional landscapes of everyday spaces. Over the past five years, Al-Samerraei has turned different spaces into makeshift studios. These temporary dwellings appear as subjects in her paintings: sometimes inhabited, sometimes deserted, marked by unfinished tasks and the lingering traces of past works on their walls. She revisits what remains of a past life and a precarious working space. In these shifting states, Al-Samerraei is also drawn to abandoned, hut-like structures that feel oddly familiar, like ghosts of the perfect house she had imagined as a child. It is a kind of séance (absence), with photography as the medium. Al-Samerraei has begun creating drawings and paintings from photographs she has taken herself as well as those filtered through the eyes of absent lovers.

Ghyzlène Boukaïla presents a mixed-media installation accompanying her lecture-performance, Djebel al-Qāf — is it reachable?. The lecture-performance takes place on Sunday, 2 November, while the installation is on view from 31 October to 2 November, as part of Open Studios.

Tamara Al-Samerraei

Tamara Al-Samerraei (b. 1977, Kuwait) is a painter who lives and works in Beirut. Her recent diaristic work explores notions of interrupted dreams, forced isolation, and recovery. Photography has always been a central medium in her practice, functioning as a way of “returning” both to painting and to the spaces she has left, or had to leave, behind. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Lebanese American University in Beirut (2002). She has presented solo exhibitions, most recently Promise You Made, Marfa’, Beirut (2023), and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Lebanon and internationally.

Ghyzlène Boukaïla

Ghyzlène Boukaïla (1993, Algiers) is a multimedia artist and filmmaker. She lives and works between Algiers and Lille. Her artistic approach and sensitivity were shaped within a family of Algerian revolutionaries. Exploring issues related to postcolonialism, her work engages with new narratives connected to socio-political and digital (r)evolutions, positioning her practice at the intersection of documentary/performance and digital storytelling, while more recently delving into questions concerning posthumanism.

Instagram Tamara Al-Samerraei

Instagram Ghyzlène Boukaïla