Tasneem Sarkez: Residency in Bhar Lazreg

What happens when an existing pictorial vocabulary encounters a new city?

For the New York-based artist Tasneem Sarkez, a two-month residency in Tunisia did not  introduce a new direction so much as the relocation of an existing methodology. Her paintings  have frequently drawn from the visual languages of commerce, popular culture and everyday life, assembling found imagery into compositions that investigate how cultural signifiers acquire meaning. During her residency, that inquiry shifted from digital circulation toward the city’s 
physical media, where the graphic vernacular of Tunis became her source material. Walking through the city, Sarkez accumulated an archive or image bank of visual fragments: taxi decals, beauty salon posters, bootleg CD covers, newspaper typography, shopping bags, souvenir postcards and commercial signage. Rather than functioning as documentary records of place, these materials undergo a process of photocollage in which they were cut apart, recombined and tested against one another before becoming paintings. Composition, in this sense, precedes representation as the works begin not with observation but with assembly.

This logic extends an ongoing concern within Sarkez’s practice. Across different contexts, cars, portraits of Arab women, commercial graphics, found text and consumer objects recur throughout her work as mutable signifiers whose meanings alter according to context. The residency reframed this vocabulary through the vernacular of Tunisia and, more broadly, the urban landscapes of North Africa. As Sarkez has described it, her practice involves “translating  these abstract concepts such as Arab femininity, the language of commercial products, and  ironic aesthetics of luxury and cars, to an audience that might not know otherwise”. Translation  therefore takes place not only between cultures or languages, but between media themselves:  typography to composition, advertisement to painting, printed ephemera to pictorial form, commercial graphics to still life. If earlier works frequently drew upon images circulating online, the works produced here are  noticeably less about “the internet” as an abstract condition and much more about physical  circulation. The artist is not mining Google Images or social media so much as walking through  Tunis and paying attention to the visual debris that accumulates in the city. Sarkez’s paintings 
are therefore concerned less with objects than with habits of looking. Women’s faces already  cropped by advertising. A banner sign normally read unconsciously. English phrases that have  become translated and detached from meaning. Taxi decals that promise safety. The artist is  consistently interested in images that have become automatic and in interrupting that  automaticity. 

In Top Women, where the title — borrowed from the language of popular music and commercial design — is already charged with associations before being severed from its original context.  Cropped female portraits drawn from fading beauty posters resist portraiture and embody  advertisement, commodity, stereotype and icon alike. Likewise, All What You Need layers the  aspirational symbolism of the Mercedes emblem with the visual language of commercial slogans and newspaper typography. Luxury, consumption and political symbolism coexist within the same pictorial field without being pinned into one single narrative. Underlying these works is an attempt to locate, or perhaps construct, a painterly vernacular  that has yet to be fully named, not as an essentialised “Arab aesthetic”, but as a contemporary visual language. It is less concerned with translating Arabness into forms that become more legible to Western audiences than with insisting on the ordinary density of the Arab present:  commercial graphics, vernacular humour, beauty culture, luxury fantasies and digital habits. Many of these references remain deliberately opaque. Seen from within a diasporic consciousness, the paintings are a response to a larger question: What kinds of images are Arabs permitted to produce of themselves in the present tense?

Racha Khemiri
Tunis. June 2026