There are places we remember, and there are places that seem to remember us.
A room after someone has left. A house seen from a distance. A bed that still holds the shape of a body. A window opening onto a garden. A small shelter somewhere between standing and collapsing. A plant growing where it should not. A photograph kept for reasons we can no longer quite explain.
Tamara Al Samerraei's paintings begin somewhere in this uncertain territory.
The images come from different times and different places. Some are photographed by Tamara, some found, some old, some new, some returning again and again. Usually, she works in a concentrated period, one painting leading to another, searching through them for a logic she cannot know in advance. These works gathered themselves differently: slowly, in pieces, over time.
What connects them is not a single story, or even a single place, but a sense that things remain open.
A house can be abandoned without becoming empty. A bed can become a landscape. An unfamiliar place can enter your memory through somebody else's photograph. An old image can return years later and ask to be looked at again.
Tamara paints these things without trying to settle what they mean.
The houses and shelters are especially tender in this regard. They are modest structures, sometimes barely structures at all: walls, roofs, doors, fragments of enclosure. They recall the imagined house of her childhood, but they also seem to belong to no one in particular. Their roofs sag, their walls dissolve, their doors disappear. They are shelters that cannot quite shelter.
And yet they remain.
In one painting, a bed sits at the center of the canvas the way a stage sits empty after the actors have gone. A figure lies within it, or is becoming part of it; the blanket folding into the same soft grey as a leg, a shoulder losing itself in the pillow behind it. Around the bed, ordinary things — curtains, a window, a plant — begin to drift from their own outlines.
There is something peculiar happening here. The more familiar a thing is, the stranger it can become.
Tamara returns to images in much the same way. Sometimes she photographs an earlier painting and paints from the photograph, allowing an image she has already made to enter the work again. It comes back, but not as it was.
This happens throughout the paintings. Scale shifts. A figure becomes an object; an object begins to resemble a body. Rooms open onto other rooms. Forms recur without quite repeating themselves.
Even the paint refuses to stay where it has been put. It runs down the surface. A wall becomes a line, a shadow becomes a stain, an object begins to dissolve. The paintings seem to be trying to hold something still while everything inside them is moving.
Perhaps this is why they feel less concerned with remembering than with what remembering does to things.
Memory does not preserve an image intact. It moves it around. Enlarges something. Erases something else. Brings one detail impossibly close and sends another far away. We return to the same room and find that it has changed, only to realize that perhaps it is we who have changed.
And so the paintings keep returning too. To the house. To the bed. To the body. To the photograph. To the possibility of shelter.
Each return leaves things slightly altered, still familiar, still somehow in motion.
And yet, something is still still.
The house is still standing.
The bed is still warm.
Everything is still ongoing.
Words by Ibrahim Nehme
