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Tamara Al Sammeraei

TAMARA AL SAMERRAEI

Can you take us back to the moment you first felt like you had to create something — and did you understand at the time what it was actually about?

I think I was 15 the first time I made a painting.  I can’t remember exactly what it was  of  but there were shades of orange  and dark colors maybe a  sunset sky or seascape from memory.  I had watched someone painting so it gave me  the desire to try using a brush and oil paint on canvas.

Where does the work live before it becomes an object? Is it a feeling, a space, a colour, a conversation — and how do you keep hold of it long enough to put it down?

It lives in a photograph. I’m drawn to suspended moments and objects that I usually capture myself on my phone. Sometimes I interact with the image immediately and sometimes it stays dormant for years before I’m ready.

Describe your studio to us — what does it look like right now, and what does it say about you?

My studio feels empty right now. There are rolls of finished paintings that were supposed to be shown last April but postoponed due to the war on Lebanon.

There are also rolls of unresolved paintings. Some prints of photos  on the wall as a reminder of what I could start next. The studio feels suspended. It is difficult for me to commit to making big works because I have the impulse to leave at any minute. There is a table dedicated to small scale watercolors and drawings that I can carry easily if I decide to leave.

Are there elements of your process that are non-negotiable — a particular material, a gesture, a ritual? What is it, and what would be lost without it?

Nothing is non negotiable, I’d like to think there is always the possibility of benefitting from accidents or lacking the usual materials and elements.

Maybe the  most thing that could put me at a loss is the absence of a pencil.

What cultural moment — a film, a show, a performance, a record, a book, a place — genuinely changed something in you?

‘Father and Son’, a film by Alexander Sokurov

When did you last make something that surprised you — and did you trust it?

2023, I did.

If someone who knew nothing about art walked into your show, what would you want them to walk out with?

Curiosity.

What images or objects have just always been around — things you’ve carried with you, kept on a wall, refused to throw out? What makes them feel like home?

A broken hair clip in the shape of bird made out of metal is always placed on a table, it moves with me.

Hatem Imam

HATEM IMAM

What does the title of our exhibition mean to you?

In landscape, the artist’s frame is an aperture that delineates a finite space, yet the
terrain extends endlessly.

Can you take us back to the moment you first felt like you had to create something — and did
you understand at the time what it was actually about?

I made drawings on my childhood cupboard. I still remember them vividly though I have
no documentation of them. I still do not understand what they were actually about.

Where does the work live before it becomes an object? Is it a feeling, a space, a colour, a
conversation — and how do you keep hold of it long enough to put it down?

Certain visions and feelings leak from the hazy seconds that precede sleep. Like drool,
they leave marks on a surface. These marks become the work.

Describe your studio to us — what does it look like right now, and what does it say about you?

It’s the right balance of chaos and order. Which perhaps says that I am a Virgo?

Are there elements of your process that are non-negotiable — a particular material, a gesture, a
ritual? What is it, and what would be lost without it?

I need to always work with my hands. Works are never conceived in my head and then
executed. I also rarely plan, I just start and then see where it goes. Without this I would
be favoring the rational part of my mind over other more dangerous and sincere terrains.

What cultural moment — a film, a show, a performance, a record, a book, a place — genuinely
changed something in you?

I recently read James Fox’s The World According to Colour and it gave new light to an
integral component of my art.

When did you last make something that surprised you — and did you trust it?

Last week at the studio. My practice is all about exploration. I have absolute trust in this
quest.

If someone who knew nothing about art walked into your show, what would you want them to
walk out with?

A small and direct sense of pleasure from looking.

What images or objects have just always been around — things you’ve carried with you, kept on
a wall, refused to throw out? What makes them feel like home?

My tools of course because they are not just home but an extension of my own self.

Salah Missi

SALAH MISSI

What does the title of our exhibition mean to you?

“Nothing Ends Here” reflects, very precisely, the reality of living in Lebanon and across the region. Through repeated cycles of destruction, loss, and survival, endings rarely arrive. On the contrary, things persist through memory, grief, ruins, and people themselves. In that sense, the title feels more of a condition we continue to live through, rather than a statement of hope.

Can you take us back to the moment you first felt like you had to create something — and did you understand at the time what it was actually about?

A lot of artists know from a young age that they can draw, and that they want to become artists. For me, I didn’t even realize I drew well until late in university — maybe around 19 or 20. During my studies in architecture, I began thinking seriously about the purpose of art. Amid all the chaos around us, I felt that what I was doing could become a way to process and make sense of what was happening around me, not as an outlet, but as a tool for sorting and understanding. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what it was about.

Where does the work live before it becomes an object? Is it a feeling, a space, a colour, a conversation — and how do you keep hold of it long enough to put it down?

The work lives in my mind for a long time — sometimes years. It usually begins as a feeling or a question, rather than a clear image. I prefer not to react directly to events, but instead to step back and allow things to brew slowly in the back of my mind. For example, the Cypress project has been on my mind for almost three years before I began visualizing it. Even when I wasn’t physically working on it, I was constantly researching, visiting cemeteries, reading about death and culture, and reflecting on these ideas. Only after living with them for a long time does the work finally begin to take shape. How do I keep hold of it? I don’t force it. I carry it with me, let it
remain in the background, and trust that when the time comes, it will surface.

Describe your studio to us — what does it look like right now, and what does it say about
you?

There is nothing particularly special in my studio, just a collection of
everyday things that make it alive: lots of plants that need care, daylight passing through old wooden shutters, books, papers, paints, and unfinished works waiting around the space. My studio usually exists somewhere between order and mess. At the moment, there are usually several things happening at once: paintings and drawings in progress, notes, and research material spread around the space. While waiting for oil paint to dry, I often move to drawing, reading, or researching something else.

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Are there elements of your process that are non-negotiable — a particular material, a gesture, a ritual? What is it, and what would be lost without it?

Time in the studio is long and takes different forms. It might be spent painting, reading, caring for plants, going for walks, or sitting with friends around the space. My process also changes depending on the project. For the current work, for example, I visit different cemeteries — tracing cypress trees and tombstones, reading about the archaeology of death, and reflecting on how different cultures perceive it. More broadly, I rarely limit my research to the subject itself; I move across different fields, always searching for connections beyond art alone. I also try to make everything myself as much as possible — from preparing the canvas to painting every detail. No assistants, no shortcuts. So perhaps what is non-negotiable for me is not a specific material or gesture, but the relationship I have with the work itself — the sense that it has to emerge from something genuinely lived and inward before taking form outside of me. Without that, something essential would be lost: the honesty of the process.

What cultural moment — a film, a show, a performance, a record, a book, a place — genuinely changed something in you?

Fifteen years ago, at the starting point of the Arab Spring, during the Tunisian revolution (‎2011), a protester (an old man) spoke these words: ‘اللحـظة هـذه أجـل مـن هـرمـنا لـقد’ — ‘We have aged waiting for this moment.’ It was a shock, an awakening. That sentence stayed with me. It made me reflect on our circumstances, the countries we live in, and whether — after thirty or forty years — I might stand where that man stood, looking back at a life consumed by waiting for liberation and justice.

When did you last make something that surprised you — and did you trust it?

My process has never really been about sudden breakthroughs or dramatic surprises. It has always been slower than that more about accumulation and gradual movement. Each piece grows from the one before it. When I look back at earlier works, I can clearly see the small shifts and developments that slowly built over time. So perhaps the best way to describe it is simply as a slow and steady movement forward, where each step quietly prepares the next.

If someone who knew nothing about art walked into your show, what would you want them to walk out with?

The power of a painting is to evoke questions, not just give answers. I want my work to be directional enough to guide the eye, but open enough that the viewer has to imagine: are those bombs or clouds? Are they landscape depictions, or graveyards? Those questions allow the audience to engage more deeply, and that engagement is what makes a work timeless it lives differently in each person’s perception. I don’t believe people “know nothing about art.” The art world often creates unnecessary borders, as if understanding were a test to pass. So I try to work through forms and images that feel fundamental and immediately humane: accessible on the surface, yet carrying deeper or absent layers that each person encounters differently according to their own intellectual and cultural background. This is what the Arab tradition calls al-sahl al-mumtani’ (الــممتنع السھــل — (the deceptively simple, the difficult easy. Without this, art risks becoming either empty ambiguity or shallow simplicity: clever but cold, or accessible but forgettable. So what do I want someone to walk away with? I want them to feel that art is for them — not a test, but a mirror. Something that pushes them to question not just what is present, but what is absent. And to trust that their own response is already enough, while sensing that deeper layers await anyone who’s looking for it.

What images or objects have just always been around — things you’ve carried with you, kept on a wall, refused to throw out? What makes them feel like home?

I honestly don’t think there is one specific object. Mostly, it is my books, notes, pens, drawings, and personal things that have simply followed me over the years. I think what makes them feel like home is less their importance as objects, and more the fact that they quietly accumulate around daily life and work.

Tagreed Darghouth

TAGREED DARGHOUTH

What does the title of our exhibition “Nothing Ends Here” mean to you?

For me the title is a description, not a slogan. In Lebanon nothing properly ends. The civil war never really ended, it just changed costumes. The October revolution did not end, it dissolved. The port explosion did not end; it spread inside us. Even the Beirut silos, which were supposed to fall, kept falling slowly, piece by piece, refusing to be one clean event. We live inside continuations. So, when I read “Nothing Ends Here”, I do not read it as a promise of hope. I read it more honestly than that. It says: the situation will keep going, the body will keep absorbing it, the work will keep being made under conditions that nobody chose. There is also another reading I like. As an artist, I never finish a painting, I leave it. I ruin an okay painting in the pursuit of one that might surprise me. There is no resolution, only the next attempt. My recent work on the wrestling ring is exactly this, repetition, collapse, return, no winner. So, the title fits a Lebanese condition and it fits a studio condition at the same time. It is a quiet statement that things continue, with us or without our consent, and that our job, as artists, is to stay attentive to what continues, instead of pretending that anything has been resolved.

Can you take us back to the moment you first felt like you had to create something, and did you understand at the time what it was actually about?

I grew up in Saida, a conservative city with almost no art events, during the civil war. My father had turned our garden into a real jungle, full of flowers, plants, animals. While the war was happening outside, he kept tending this small contained world. I think that was my first studio, long before I knew the word. I was a child who danced, sang and drew, not because I had decided to be an artist but because there was a need to add something to a reality that kept subtracting. At the time I did not understand it as protest or as therapy. I just knew that making something made the day bearable. Becoming a professional artist did not feel like a realistic option from where I was standing, so I first set out to study interior design. A single conversation with a fellow student gave me the courage to switch into fine arts, and from then on, the question stopped being whether I would paint and became how. The deeper meaning of that childhood need only arrived years later, after I had moved to Beirut, after I had spent enough time in the studio to look back and recognise what the child in the garden had already been doing. She was answering the war with a flower. She did not have language for it, but the act was already political, already a refusal.

Where does the work live before it becomes an object? Is it a feeling, a space, a colour, a conversation, and how do you keep hold of it long enough to put it down?

It usually starts as an irritation. Something I cannot stop noticing, a news image that does not leave me, a sentence in a book, the way people speak about a war as if it were weather. It is not yet a feeling, more like a small splinter. Then it becomes a conversation, with myself, with friends, with a text. Stephen Graham’s Cities Under Siege sat with me for a long time before Gardens and Jungles existed. The wrestling figures in Chaos in the Ring began as a question about why we keep rehearsing conflict as spectacle. Only after that does it become colour and gesture. I never have a premeditated image. I keep the splinter alive by working every day, going to the studio every morning, layering, ruining, returning. A tree may have another tree below it, and a third tree below that. The painting holds the idea for me; I do not have to hold it. Sometimes the canvas surprises me, and that is the sign that the thing has finally arrived. So, to your question, the work lives in the friction between what I cannot ignore and what I do not yet know how to say. I keep hold of it not by remembering it, but by showing up to the studio with enough patience to let it find its own shape, on its own time.

Describe your studio to us, what does it look like right now, and what does it say about you?

The studio is busy. Paintings lean on every wall, large works on paper are pinned across the panels, colours sit in open pots on the central table, brushes are everywhere I left them the day before. The exact arrangement changes by the week, so describing it precisely would miss the point. What is constant is the feel of the room. It is a working space, not a display space.

At first glance it can seem chaotic, but there is a logic to it. The works exist in different stages of development, and their proximity to one another creates conversations, tensions, and possibilities that shape what happens next. The studio’s disorder is not accidental; it is part of the way the work advances.

Almost nothing in it is truly finished. The paintings continue to shift through layering, revision, erasure, and return. They rarely arrive at a settled state until the approach of an exhibition demands decisions. Even then, completion often feels provisional rather than final. What the studio echoes, more than its layout, is the way my practice has always worked: a process of continual growth, interruption, and reconfiguration. The studio says, very simply, that the work is still becoming.

Are there elements of your process that are non-negotiable, a particular material, a gesture, a ritual? What is it, and what would be lost without it?

The non-negotiable thing is the gesture. I arrived at this conviction slowly, through years of trial and error in front of the canvas. There has to be a subject, a gesture, and a lot of passion, otherwise the painting becomes illustration, and illustration does not interest me. The gesture is what puts me physically and mentally inside the work. For a long time, acrylic on canvas was my whole vocabulary, because it lets me layer fast, delete, push, deposit, restart in the same session. I love colour the way someone loves cooking with all the ingredients at once. Recently, with the No Winners and Chaos in the Ring work, I have added charcoal and pastel on paper, on a large scale. Charcoal is brutal, ephemeral, hard to control. It rewards speed and decision and does not let you hide. That has become non-negotiable too, because the wrestling figures needed a material as direct as their subject. The other non-negotiable is the daily walk to the studio. I work every day, morning to late afternoon, in a continuous, cyclical way. Inside the studio, everything else stays outside, the anger, the news, the noise. The ritual is simply: arrive, close the door, work. If you took the gesture away, the painting would still exist, but it would no longer be mine. And if you took the door away, I would not be able to paint at all.

What cultural moment, a film, a show, a performance, a record, a book, a place, genuinely changed something in you?

Three things, from very different parts of my life. The first is Georg Baselitz’s Heroes series. I revisit it whenever I want a feast for my eyes. He catches me both in how he thinks and how he paints, and his palette is something I keep returning to. Through him I went deeper into German Expressionism, into Lupertz, De Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Soutine. They gave me the permission, very early, to be figurative without being polite, and to trust paint as a language in itself, not as a delivery system for an image. The second is Stephen Graham’s Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. That book restructured the way I look at my own street. It gave a name to something I had been feeling for years, the slow militarisation of ordinary civilian life, the surveillance, the borders inside borders. Gardens and Jungles grew directly out of reading it. The third is smaller but persistent, Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. The way that song faces violence without flinching, and uses beauty as the thing that makes the violence unbearable, taught me something I keep applying. Make the surface seductive enough that the viewer cannot look away, then let the subject do its work. That, I think, is the whole project.

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When did you last make something that surprised you, and did you trust it?

The wrestling figures surprised me. For years my work lived around war machines, surveillance, camouflage, the silos, the olive tree, the toy soldier. Serious subjects, serious surfaces. Then I started drawing wrestlers, in charcoal, at a scale that took over the wall. Bodies overextending, gloves hanging, the theatrical fall, the stare-down. The tone shifted. It became sardonic, almost absurd. Every wrestler a philosopher, albeit a sweaty one. At first, I did not trust it. I thought, am I allowed this kind of humour while the region is on fire? Is this a detour? Then I understood that it was not a detour at all. The ring is exactly the same problem I have been painting for fifteen years, only without the uniform. It is humanity rehearsing conflict as spectacle, repeating the same gestures, calling it sports, calling it politics, calling it news. No resolution, only repetition. Once I saw that, I trusted it completely. I also trusted the medium, which is new for me at this scale. Charcoal does not allow second thoughts the way acrylic does. You commit, you correct visibly, you let the paper warp and absorb. That fragility was the right honesty for the subject. So yes, the surprise was real, and trusting it has opened a door I was not expecting to walk through this late in the practice.

If someone who knew nothing about art walked into your show, what would you want them to walk out with?

Not a lecture. Not a position. A recognition. I would like them to walk out feeling that something in the room belonged to them, even if they cannot name what. A landscape they have actually stood in. A body that moves the way their body moves when they are tired. A flower that reminded them of someone. A silo that looked, for a second, like a building from their own street. Painting, for me, is a conversation. We have to share the language we own with others, and there must be something in the work that the viewer is genuinely interested in, otherwise it is a monologue. I do not want my work to test anyone, or to make them feel that they need a glossary before they are allowed inside. I want them to come in by the surface, by the colour, by the gesture, and only afterwards begin to notice what the painting is actually about. If a visitor who has never set foot in a gallery leaves my show and, a week later, looks at a news image differently, looks at a tree differently, looks at their own city differently, then the work has done its job. Painting cannot stop a war. But it can change, very quietly, the way a person pays attention. That is what I would want them to walk out with. Attention.

What images or objects have just always been around, things you’ve carried with you, kept on a wall, refused to throw out? What makes them feel like home?

After Lebanon’s financial collapse and the Beirut port explosion, I waited about a year for things to calm down. They kept getting worse. There was no electricity, no water, no real conditions to paint in, and eventually I took the decision to move to the UAE. It was not an escape from Lebanon; it was a decision to protect the work. Once I was settled in Dubai and had re-established my routine, the canvases, the paper on the floor, the morning-to-late-afternoon rhythm, the same gestures, I understood something I had not understood before: the studio is my home. Not the building it sits in, not the city around it, not even the country. It happens, today, to be in Dubai. It could be elsewhere tomorrow. The address is incidental. What is constant is the room with the door closed and the work continuing inside it. That does not weaken my ties to Lebanon, on the contrary. Lebanon is my whole material. My childhood in Saida, my father’s garden, the years in Beirut, the silos, the explosion, the people, the failures, the stubbornness, all of it remains the substance of what I paint. The country lives in the work, not in the postcode. So, when you ask what makes things feel like home, my honest answer is: the studio is the home, and Lebanon is what the studio is always painting about.