Contact


        
info@roseeaston.com
tasneemsarkez@gmail.com

B. 2002, Portland, OR.
Based in New York, NY



The New York based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create pieces that are united by their elegant marriage of pop visuals and potent sociopolitical symbolism. Elements of autobiography combine with broader mainstream signifiers, often nodding to American media and culture, in an ongoing exploration of her own experience of living in the diaspora as an Arab woman. The car – a universally recognized symbol of speed, status, commerce, mechanisation and technology – frequently recurs as a subject in her work, with a particular focus on the customisations that are made to privately-owned vehicles. These one-off alterations have the power to turn each machine into a functional, three-dimensional reflection of its driver’s aspirations, politics, class, and identity, and Sarkez, drawing on Arab car culture, plays on this delicate balance between self-expression and capitalist pressure. She presents the souped-up automobile as an ostensible symbol of the West that is ripe for perversion, reinvention, and destruction: a mechanised meme, heavily lacquered with irony, and powered by the tensions between good taste and bad taste; the individual and the state; kitsch and violence; the Arab world and America; masculinity and femininity; the past and the present.

- Phillipa Snow


Selected Solo exhibitions include: Romance, Pittsburgh (forthcoming, 2025), ‘White-Knuckle’ - Rose Easton, (London, UK, 2025).

Selected group exhibitions include: ‘miART’ - Rose Easton (Milan, IT, 2025), ‘Poor Images’ - Siddiq Projects (Hamburg, GE, 2025), ‘we know nothing about people who don’t cry’ - Romance (Pittsburgh, PA, 2025), ‘SLxRE (New York)’ - Silke Lindner (New York, NY, 2024), ‘Art Brussels’ - Rose Easton (Brussels, BE, 2024), ‘Dirt in the Eye’ - Gnossienne Gallery (London, UK, 2024), ‘Saccharine Symbols’ - Rose Easton (London, UK 2023), ‘Me and you and me and’ - SADE Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023), ‘Beginner's Luck’ - Rosenberg Gallery (New York, NY, 2023), ‘Transversal: Where We Come From and Where We Are Going’ - 80 WSE Gallery (New York, NY, 2023), ‘Printing the Future’ - Diefirma Gallery (New York, NY, 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 and FORMA Arts, London, UK.