"First I thought that maybe all this tension was filling the space and that by now our souls must have already haunted the places where we lingered, but I was wrong and it all made sense in a dream, because in reality those places they actually haunted us and tasked us."
(Excerpt from a text written by Roy Samaha)
Trained as a painter, Tamara Al-Samerraei’s practice encompasses painting, illustration, photography, animation, video and installation, often mixing the conventions of each medium by using processes and effects such as transferring, scanning, photographing photographs and pentimento.
Let Me Stay a Little Longer is an exhibition of paintings constituted by found objects and spaces as much as recurrent characters. They are inherently part of the tension and uncanniness of the spatial environments that are often associated with images of staged sets and crime scenes.
Layered and deliberately unpolished, Al-Samerraei’s work often explores ways for parallel narratives to exist where in a given time and space they are invisible. These narratives are sometimes embedded in margins, boxes, and wallpaper patterns.
