Contact


        
info@roseeaston.com
tasneemsarkez@gmail.com

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


Employing an aesthetic she describes as "Arab kitsch," the New York based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create works that are united by an elegant marriage of pop culture visuals and potent 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 culture of the internet, with its ability to disseminate and recontextualise images on a global scale, is influential on her practice, as is a more art-historical interest in both romance and poetics. She has described her work as being intended to evoke a feeling of "Apricity," an old-fashioned word that refers to the experience of feeling the rays of the sun in winter: a revelation of something real and warm hidden beneath the cool, slick surface of commercial imagery.

Selected exhibitions include: ‘SLxRE (New York)’ - Silke Lindner (New York, NY, 2024), ‘Art Brussels’ - Rose Easton Gallery (Brussels, BE, 2024), ‘Dirt in the Eye’ - Gnossienne Gallery (London, UK, 2024), ‘Saccharine Symbols’ - Rose Easton Gallery (London, UK 2023), ‘Me and you and me and’ - SADE Gallery (Los Angeles, 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 and FORMA Arts, London, UK.