Employing a visual style she has described as "Arab kitsch," the New York-based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create works which elegantly blend pop visuals and potent sociopolitical symbolism. Elements of autobiography combine with mainstream signifiers, often nodding to American culture, in an exploration of her diasporic experience as an Arab woman. The car - a universally recognised symbol of status, commerce and technology - recurs as a subject. The aesthetic language of the internet, with its ability to disseminate and recontextualise images, is also hugely influential on Sarkez's practice, as is an art-historical interest in romance and poetics.

With her choice of subjects and framing, she draws parallels between the algorithmic curation of material on the internet, and the more traditional arrangement of painterly still lives, two modes of juxtaposition that imbue their composite parts with new significance by placing unexpected objects and symbols side-by-side. She has also expressed an interest in conjuring a sense of "Apricity," a word that refers to the experience of feeling the rays of the sun in winter: a revelation of something real and warm hidden beneath an otherwise cool surface.

Text courtesy of Rose Easton.