Meet the Artist Inspired by Facts, Fake News, and AI
It must come as no surprise to say that in the digital age, memory is a fickle thing. With a click of a button, reality becomes fiction — whether it's filtered, photoshopped, or deepfaked — and is accepted as fact. It’s an internet phenomenon that has transcended beyond the brain-rot-inducing meme culture of the 2010s, instead, waltzing into the 2025 playbooks of aspiring and career politicians, (see Elon Musk’s deepfaked video on X of him and Donald Trump boogying to Staying Alive, for reference). As for the disillusionment of it all, no one knows this more than New York-based, Libyan artist Tasneem Sarkez, whose UK solo debut exhibition White-Knuckle at Rose Easton, capitalises on this very topic by rendering real-life fragments through video game-like graphics, all in all casting a watchful eye over just exactly how the internet so intently - and expertly - distorts reality.
Much like elected officials farming for Tiktok likes, there’s something disquieting about the Libyan-American artist’s paintings that’s hard to pinpoint. Perhaps it’s the compilation of seemingly unrelated images, smouldering eyes superimposed over a Fuschia rose in one painting. In another, a hazy Honda bike is stamped with Turkey’s crescent and star emblem, as if AI was asked to generate a Benadryl-induced fever dream. ‘For me, it’s important to have the image come from a place of reality — to a degree. And however much of the image is altered or imagined, is still able to cement itself to the experience of encountering that moment in reality,’ explained Sarkez. ‘What it means to encounter the photograph of the real-life event again, after the moment has passed, allows us to come to new meanings through the ritualisation of it.’
First Lady is one such image. A red capped woman is all made-up, her blush and lipstick and eyeliner at odds with her utilitarian khaki top. It's a foggy memory of Muammar Gaddafi’s elite team of all-female bodyguards, whom he reportedly required to take an oath of chastity and to be well-manicured at all times. With the text ‘First Lady’ emblazoned below her — in shades of green similar to Gaddafi’s Green Book — the image reflects on the political figureheads who deftly pioneered the use of outrage and entertainment to cultivate a media persona pre-Donald Trump. After all, it was Western media that dubbed the bodyguards ‘Amazonian Guards,’ a glitzy title used when creating salacious photo galleries of them online.
Images can be deceiving. In actuality, their supposed glamorous lifestyle was anything but: Former ‘Amazonian Guards’ later came forward to report they had been raped and abused by the dictator and his sons. ‘For me as a Libyan-American, I’ve grown up with this constant feeling of things that are missing, broken, or unknown,’ said Sarkez, when asked if separating fact and fiction is important to her practice. ‘I think rather than separate the two, it's important for me as a painter to integrate both because I think one does not exist without the other. I often play with the paradoxes of culture, and sitting in that aesthetic zone or impulse, is about me portraying the boundaries that exist between leisure and pressure, political and personal, universal and specific, and ultimately fact and fiction to create ‘truths.’
Put simply, Sarkez wields fake news (both the term hurled at facts and fictionalised information) to create art that captures ugly realities. G-Class dancing with the Shah smells of sex: sky-high black pumps plastered with the Mercedes-Benz logo. On the surface, it speaks to the allure of luxury cars, but on further inspection, it satirises the Mercedes-Benz G-Class’ origins as a military vehicle. Although first commissioned by the then-Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with a little clever marketing, the car has long since transcended its war machine roots to become a lusty status symbol. Not so sexy now, is it?
‘The more we retell the same memory, it’s never technically the same as it's registered in our brain,’ she said, adding, ‘I will always find inspiration in real-life events and take up interest because the archive becomes more dynamic and active when it’s engaged with in real-time, rather than left to just its definition.’ Forgotten bits and pieces of history are dusted off and modernised by Sarkez for a generation raised by AI-generated videos of toddlers duelling baby panda bears. The overarching truth is that the beauty of her work lies in the fact that they could very well be an artificial intelligence’s visual interpretation of ‘Amazonian Guards’ or Mercedes-Benz G-Class’ history - an artistic metaphor executed to perfection. Alas, it's quite clear no machine could ever create something so brilliantly original — or thought-provoking. Thank god for the human mind!