Tamara Al Samerraei’s work is often triggered by photographs from her personal archive and from the public domain such as film stills, google images, stolen and borrowed photographs. Since the start of her journey as an artist, she has been curious about the interface between the two mediums. She depicts interior and outdoor spaces, objects, and figures that are stripped of everything except their bare essence. Her details are vague and pigments take on the appearance of discoloration or the inverse of it.
Objects, silent and inanimate but alive, are a recurring element in almost all her paintings. Her narratives are sometimes disrupted by an outside interference from the bare margin of the canvas into the frame. Like a spectral vision, we register a palpable presence even when we can’t physically see it.