Born in Portland, Oregon in 2002 to Libyan immigrant parents and now based in New York, Tasneem Sarkez works across painting and sculpture in a practice she describes as "Arab kitsch." Working primarily in oil, she builds compositions sourced from Arab social media and the visual grammar of early-2000s internet design Growing up in predominantly white Portland, Sarkez's access to Libyan and Arab culture came through the internet rather than through family, and consequently engages with it via the web's own disseminative logic. The gap between an image in its original context and the same image as it arrives elsewhere runs through her practice as a structural condition; blurs and crops native to digital compression become painterly qualities. "Arab kitsch" names the aesthetic territory this produces. Where Greenberg dismissed kitsch as culturally worthless, Sarkez recuperates it as a site of hybridisation: consumer objects that acquire cultural weight through their circulation and mistranslation. The rose stencilled onto a spare-wheel cover and the perfume sold in Arab neighbourhood delis with labels like "Obama" or "Come To Me Again" are objects in transit, addressed to two audiences at once. Arab kitsch also encompasses the WhatsApp stickers and illustrated greetings circulated among the older Arab generation, an internet culture whose aesthetic registers in Sarkez's work as directly as graphic design. The car is Sarkez's most persistent subject. In Good Morning (2023), a muted rendering of a Jeep is overwritten with Arabic script. The phrase operates as a banal greeting and, within WANA internet culture, as a meme category invisible to anglophone viewers. Sarkez also draws on Libyan drift-racing videos, a subculture in which young men modify Western-produced cars to ultimately destroy them. The women whose eyes appear framed in windscreens at the edge of these videos are a persistent reference point, a feminine presence at the periphery of an aggressively masculine spectacle. Text operates throughout as an image in its own right. First Lady pairs a portrait of one of Gaddafi's so-called Amazonian bodyguards with soap packaging text playing on virginity and purity, setting the spectacle of female military service against the language of products that sell the idea of being "pure." A militaristic register runs through Sarkez's titles and imagery more broadly: White-Knuckle, Golden Gun, stilettos with pistols for heels. Her sculptural work Heart Notes No. 2 (2025) assembles found perfume bottles from Arab neighbourhoods on a metal cart, their original labels replaced by Sarkez's own in the same linguistic register: "Coney Island Sand," "Soulmate," "Sexy Girl." The bottles record an acculturation arrested mid-process: a simultaneous reach toward exoticism and assimilation. Sarkez graduated with a BFA from New York University in 2024. Solo presentations include White-Knuckle at Rose Easton, London, and Just For You at ROMANCE, Pittsburgh (both 2025), with a residency at Selma Feriani Gallery, La Goulette, Tunisia forthcoming in 2026. Her work is held in the collections of FORMA Arts, London and the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She received the Martin Wong Award in 2023.
Written by Victoria Comstock-Kershaw.
Courtesy of L’Atelier by Selma Feriani, Nafas and brave Projects.
Tasneem Sarkez portrait by Mehdi Ben Temessek