Tamara Al-Mashouk is a London-based Palestinian-Saudi artist and organiser who employs multi-channel video, performance, and architectural installation to examine the displacement of people on both intimate and global scales. Her work negotiates the relationship between home, memory, and collective histories, expanding the study of epigenetics beyond the body into place and matter. Her socially engaged practice addresses intersections of personal histories, global migratory narratives, and identity, rooted in anti-racist, de-colonial, and anti-imperialist frameworks.
Tamara’s work ‘I’d search forever, I want to remember’ currently showing at 198 Contemporary Arts in London, was originally commissioned in Kent and London with partners including Counterpoints and we asked the artist about the new show.
Hey Tamara, does the work feel different in this new space ?
Absolutely, it’s been interesting exploring re-exhibiting the wave machine– it’s a huge work: 7 meters long, it slices space. It’s not easy to fit into a gallery, and I almost said no; I didn’t want it to feel like a sculpture too big in a space too small. But there’s this one long wall at 198, right when you come in, that has three little windows in the top left corner that give you these perfect slices of the greenery outside. The wave machine is almost perfectly framed by this wall and centred under the middle window. When you find a way for a work to respond to the architecture of a space, it just makes sense and something inside me is soothed– that’s when I know it’s right.
What’s the response been like?
The response at the Private View from the new friends and collaborators who’ve come into my life since I made the work two years ago was really special. Many people have heard me talk about the wave machine or seen photos, but to see it in motion, to understand its scale, to hear the sound the ribs make when they move, to hear the sound of the water being pushed.. There’s really nothing like standing in a room with it. It’s really extraordinary and humbling to hear some of the most thoughtful people in my life respond to the work, draw from it, and create stories from it. It really does live and breathe and expand through their bearing witness.
And does the project feel different now at this time?
So much has changed in my body and in the world since I first exhibited this work in the summer of 2023. Bearing witness and remembering feels more important now than ever. This new global landscape is something Fadi and I really considered when developing his new performance for 198 – most notably Fadi wanted to confront, to look people in the eyes, to move through them and force them to move for him. And I wanted him to perform in silence, to bring a loud room of people to stillness.
** Fadi Giha is a choreographer and dancer, who choreographed a sequence that allows his body to simultaneously be swept up in the water and embody the water itself. It is in this liberatory practice of confronting victimhood that Giha shifts power.
You recently had a show at Incubator, are there ways in which it was connected to this project?
There are so many ways the two bodies of work are connected. I wanted a story to continue to develop, for example: through my use of certain materials like the sapele wood which I used for the wave machine making an appearance at Incubator in All That Remains. The two of course share a use of water– a wave machine and a crying wall. And they both deal with memory and movement. That said– I’d search forever draws on my own experience of navigating visas and unwelcoming immigration systems for my whole life, but it was only my entry point which made me think: if it’s this traumatising for me, with all that I have, I can’t imagine how it must be for someone fleeing war. Whereas ‘I don’t want to stab the beast I just want to go home’ is my whole naked heart in an exhibition, it’s the most intimate body of work I’ve made and it’s about my home, my story, my soul.
Looking back on ‘I’d Search Forever’ are there things you feel you’ve learned as an artist that you will take forward?
Everything! I’d search forever was like boot camp.. I didn’t really have time to be nervous because I had to design and create the whole body of work in one summer plus host the programme of events that came with it, it was low key insane, but I’m an intense person and it worked! Most notably, what I’ll be carrying forward is how much I love bringing together my organizing / event production practices with my art practice. Magic happens when you put people in a room together with excellent art on a large scale and the warmth of Arab hospitality I inherited from my mama. It was actually Tom Green at Counterpoints who helped me contextualize my hosting as a creative practice and that is a beautiful gift I will always be grateful for!
Photos by Hugo Glendinning, Dominique Croshaw
