Tamara Al Samerraei

Tamara Al Samerraei was born in 1977 in Kuwait and lives and works in Beirut. She paints on raw, loose linen with frayed edges, which is then mounted on a larger canvas so that bare margins surround the image. Her sources are photographs from her own archive and from the public domain, including film stills and borrowed snapshots.

From 2017 to 2018 she painted a series of recreational swimming pools, often with a single bather in opaque water; later work does away with the figure. The Black Book series, shown in Promise You Made at Marfa' in 2023, is painted from photographs of her watercolour diary entries from 2020 to 2022. Studio paintings such as Studio 4 (2023) record the walls of the temporary rooms she has worked in.

Al Samerraei received a BA in Fine Arts from the Lebanese American University in 2002 and completed the inaugural year of Ashkal Alwan's Home Workspace Program from 2011 to 2012. Her solo exhibitions include Something White (2008) and Fleeting Fences (2011) at Agial Art Gallery, Make Room for Me at Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2014), and What Floats in Space (2019) at Marfa'. Group exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbours at MAXXI, Rome (2017) and Homeworks 9 at the Sursock Museum, Beirut (2024).