Eva Gold

The work of the British visual artist Eva Gold is united by her undeniable eye for the cinematic, with her knowingly fetishistic use of materials like bone, steel, leather, gaffer tape, barbed wire and vulcanised rubber suggesting an oblique or hidden narrative behind every installation. Sometimes directly referencing auteurs like the Austrian sadomodernist master Michael Haneke in her work, she applies a keenly directorial approach to her own imagined scenes, focusing on abstracted details in order to provoke the viewer into wondering what is happening beyond the frame. Often, this deliberate elision of the wider picture is used to suggest mysterious tension, illicitness, uncanniness, or the possibility of an unknown threat. Absence becomes more alarming than actual presence, and a sense of voyeurism is countered by the strange conviction that we cannot really know what we are seeing in the first place. Several pieces suggest bodies-as-parts: either dismantled, or present only in the ghostly shapes of dark, hanging clothes, as if to leave the viewer to decide whether the figures being depicted mean us harm. We are tasked with filling in the blanks, and the way that we choose to fill them acts – Rorschach-like– as a revealing indicator of our own fears, proclivities, and hang-ups.

Gold, who also uses writing as a medium, draws on a blend of fact and fiction for inspiration throughout her practice, both in an attempt to place the viewer on unstable ground, and to resist an ongoing critical temptation to suggest that narratively driven work made by female practitioners must be purely autobiographical in nature. She incorporates found items that arrive with their own inbuilt histories, such as earrings that have been recovered from a nightclub bathroom, and plays with sensory elements like scent – that of tobacco or soap, for example – in order to effectively submerge the viewer in her delicately engineered, richly realised worlds. Power, violence, and the volatile nexus between both of these major forces per existence under the constraints of capitalism recur as potent touchstones, as do references to America – a place whose culture, in addition to being its own locus for cinema, presents us with amplified examples of this particular dynamic tension. Gold is interested in power imbalances of all kinds, from sexual to economic, and the withholding of information from her audience allows her to wield a kind of power over them, too: each installation is at once an exercise in storytelling, a psychological experiment, and an act of creative domination.

Tasneem Sarkez

The New York based artist Tasneem Sarkez works across various media to create pieces that are united by their elegant marriage of pop visuals and potent socio-political symbolism. Elements of autobiography combine with broader mainstream signifiers, often nodding to American media and culture, in an ongoing exploration of her own experience of living in the diaspora as an Arab woman. The car – a universally recognized symbol of speed, status, commerce, mechanisation and technology – frequently recurs as a subject in her work, with a particular focus on the customisations that are made to privately-owned vehicles. These one-off alterations have the power to turn each machine into a functional, three-dimensional reflection of its driver’s aspirations, politics, class, and identity, and Sarkez, drawing on Arab car culture, plays on this delicate balance between self-expression and capitalist pressure. She presents the souped-up automobile as an ostensible symbol of the West that is ripe for perversion, reinvention, and destruction: a mechanised meme, heavily lacquered with irony, and powered by the tensions between good taste and bad taste; the individual and the state; kitsch and violence; the Arab world and America; masculinity and femininity; the past and the present.

The visual language of the internet, with its ability to disseminate and recontextualise images on a global scale, is also hugely influential on Sarkez’s practice, as is an art-historical interest in both romance and poetics.With both her choice of subjects and her framing, she draws parallels between the algorithmic curation of material on social media or Google, and the more traditional arrangement of painterly still lives. Both modes of juxtaposition manage to imbue their composite parts with new significance, whether via the placement of unexpected symbols and objects side-by-side, or through the amplification of common traits. Sarkez has expressed an interest in conjuring a sense of “Apricity,” an old fashioned word that refers to the experience of feeling the rays of the sun in winter: a revelation of something real and warm hidden beneath the cool, slick surface of commercial imagery. Her interest in signage, and in the semiotics of both memes and advertising, is mirrored by her own use of both visual double-entendres and subliminal messaging. In much of her work, a carefully calibrated, lovingly detailed recreation of ‘trashy’ or ‘bootlegged’ aesthetics – sourced from on and offline, and blending documentary with fiction – serves as an alluring smokescreen for commentary. In Good Morning (2023) for instance, a painting of a bright red rose – the ur-symbol of old-school romance – is playfully undercut by the fact that the flower being depicted is, in fact, not a flower at all, but a custom spare tire cover for a car: Henri Fantin- Latour meets J.G. Ballard meets The Real Housewives of Dubai, commerce and technology and the high-feminine colliding in a piece that is at once archly satirical, and achingly sincere. It is this push-and-pull between opposing extremes that gives her work its specific, hyper-modern electricity.