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ARTIST STATEMENT
Mashallah (2023)
This painting is a part of an ongoing series that explores the relationship between displays of identity and the iconography of automobilia. Linking the different visual languages of arab semiotics with the modernity of cars adorned with vinyl, these works portray arabness in its modernity while maintaining its historicity. Sarkez works from photographs she has taken or found to highlight the relationship between image circulation and identity development as an Arab woman growing up with the internet. This particular piece represents the idea of pride as armor, and the attitudes of punkness in relation to marginalized identities that’s adopted when one is being positioned as an “other”.
Studs (2023)
Studs have their own connotation of alternative, punk, and militant aesthetics. Sarkez is interested in the gesture of adornment and considers what it means when a stud is affixed to something, experimenting with the malleability of aesthetics and material they attach to. Sarkez explores isolating these smaller objects, emphasizing and centering the modification and reorientation of an ordinary object as a means to develop identity and emerge new ones.
Self Portrait (2009)
Children of a diaspora are more attuned to noticing the life and death of an object, a place, etc. This is a self portrait of the ballet flats Sarkez wore to a wedding in Libya as a young child in 2009. The flats that were once worn are displayed as if they are yet to be worn, or perhaps left behind. In separating the shoes and socks, they become a mournful object using absence as an affect. The disorientation, dislocation, and departing of innocent feminine objects is left in ode to memorialize Sarkez’s child memory and person. Sarkez remarks, “It’s a self reflective piece of the social death diasporic people have when they’re a little kid.”
BIO
Tasneem Sarkez (b. 2002, Portland, USA), lives and works in New York. She is currently completing her BFA at NYU and will graduate in 2024. Sarkez’ practice considers ways of identification, collecting, archiving, and finding refuge in cultural materiality and proximity to it. Through extensive research, and the creation of her own archive, Sarkez works to develop her own translational abstraction of Arabness. Selected exhibitions include: Saccharine Symbols, Rose Easton Gallery, London, UK (2023); Me and you and me and, SADE Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2023); Beginner’s Luck, Rosenberg Gallery, New York (2023); Transversal: Where We Come From and Where We Are Going, 80 WSE Gallery, New York (2023); Printing the Future, Diefirma Gallery, New York (2022). In 2023 she received the Martin Wong Award from the Martin Wong Foundation. Her work is in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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