Make Room For Me
An exhibition by Tamara Al-Samerai
21 January - 12 February 2014
Gypsum Gallery, Cairo
Kuwaiti artist Tamara Al-Samerai's recent solo show is loosely inspired by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Al-Samerai engages with the book as a story about societal values that tackles notions of revenge, fear, love, jealousy, absence, and death while negotiating the boundary between adolescence and adulthood.
A sense of anxiety underlies much of the work: a pack of dogs run toward an unspecified object, a vacant chair, a solitary cactus, or an open laptop. Inanimate everyday objects seem to take on a life of their own in her work. In another series, a sequence of charcoal on canvas drawings resembles an action packed storyboard. At the center of each drawing, two androgynous girls are shown entangled in an intense encounter.
Trained as a painter, Al-Samerai's practice includes illustration, photography, animation, video, and installation, and her work has been presented in institutions worldwide. She lives and works in Beirut.