[Al-Samerai`s drawing series act like action-packed storyboards of the live of adolescents. Image courtesy of Medrar TV.]

Tamara Al-Samerai: Make Room For Me

By : Medrar TV مدرار تي في

Make Room For Me

An exhibition by Tamara Al-Samerai

21 January - 12 February 2014

Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Kuwaiti artist Tamara Al-Samerai`s recent solo show is loosely inspired by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Al-Samerai engages with the book as a story about societal values that tackles notions of revenge, fear, love, jealousy, absence, and death while negotiating the boundary between adolescence and adulthood.

A sense of anxiety underlies much of the work: a pack of dogs run toward an unspecified object, a vacant chair, a solitary cactus, or an open laptop. Inanimate everyday objects seem to take on a life of their own in her work. In another series, a sequence of charcoal on canvas drawings resembles an action packed storyboard. At the center of each drawing, two androgynous girls are shown entangled in an intense encounter.

Trained as a painter, Al-Samerai`s practice includes illustration, photography, animation, video, and installation, and her work has been presented in institutions worldwide. She lives and works in Beirut.

[This video is produced by Medrar TV and is featured in partnership with Jadaliyya Culture.]

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Hussein Baydoun is a Lebanese artist, architect, and scenographer who is known for his unique approach to set design. Baydoun frequently participates in the creation and development of performances from their early stages with the view that scenography is an essential component to the creation of theatrical work, one no less important than the script. His designs are often inspired by the performance spaces in which he works, where he creates fascinating sets from whatever is available as he challenges conventional notions about theater production, such as in his most recent performance "Alice," which was produced in collaboration with Lebanese playwright and director Sawsan Bou Khaled. In September, Baydoun returned to Cairo to lead a scenography workshop following the same vision. At the American University in Cairo`s Falaki Theater, he worked with six upcoming set designers, in addition to amateurs, on creating imaginative environments from the remnants of old sets and other discarded objects. This video highlights the vision and development of the workshop as Baydoun describes the aim of his teaching methods.