NASO interviews: Tamara Kalo
On Art as an Archive
“I live between places and across timelines. The personal is always intersecting with the historical in my work. I’m interested in what is inherited—not just through blood or lineage, but through space, ritual, and the body. Art, for me, is a way of navigating these invisible inheritances and making them visible, however fleetingly.”
On Beginnings:
“I was always attracted to the arts,” Kalo reflects. “But it took time—and some rupture—for me to claim it fully.” Trained as an architect at UC Berkeley (California, USA), Kalo initially pursued design disciplines that blended her affinities for mathematics, physics, and spatial form. Yet, it was the 2020 Beirut port explosion—an event that reverberated across the region and diaspora—that catalyzed a turning point. “It felt like a wake-up call,” she says. “Suddenly it was urgent to bear witness, to contribute to the cultural landscape.”
Born in the early 1990s to Lebanese parents who had relocated to Riyadh after the civil war, Kalo’s childhood unfolded between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon—an experience that underpins the dualities often present in her work: displacement and rootedness, interiority and exposure, myth and material. Since returning to the region in 2021, she has been immersed in a flourishing ecosystem of artist-run spaces, residencies, and collectives. “I was craving that in California and couldn’t quite find it,” she recalls. “Here, I was welcomed almost
immediately. There’s a shared cultural fluency and an openness to experimentation.”
Raised in Riyadh and deeply rooted to Beirut, she navigates a unique relationship with the region—one that is neither fully present nor fully distant. “Beirut is such a beautiful and heartbreaking place,” she reflects. “It’s dense, rich, colorful, chaotic—overwhelming in every way.”
On Process:
"What I want to do, and what I want to say, really depends on the moment," she explains. "Whether it's a commission, a residency, or something personal, it always begins with writing, feeling and thinking—ideas that return again and again."
Kalo's practice is contemplative and layered, anchored in reflection and intimate observations of place. Raised in Riyadh and deeply rooted to Beirut, she navigates a unique relationship with the region—one that is neither fully present nor fully distant “Beirut is such a beautiful and heartbreaking place,” she reflects. “It’s dense, rich, colorful, chaotic—overwhelming in every way.”
This liminality—of geography, identity, and belonging—forms the foundation of her work. Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the wider Arab region, and their visual, material, and philosophical histories inspire her not only as subject but as structure. “It’s not just the place, but how one relates to it,” she says. “That in-between-ness—something more liminal—is what interests me.”
On Artistic Evolution:
Kalo's first major residency, Intermix Bodies as Landscapes in Riyadh’s JAX District, further developed a deeply embodied strand in her work. Her two-channel video performance, Ode to Elisar, remains a touchstone. In it, Kalo measures the grounds of her childhood compound using the length of her arms as a unit—a poetic gesture of reclaiming and quantifying space through the body. Simultaneously, she weaves a long rope from collected materials with members of the community, culminating in a maternal act: her mother wraps the rope around her. The piece draws on the story of Elisar, the Phoenician queen who, exiled from Tyre in 800 BC, founded Carthage by cunningly claiming land the size of a bull’s hide. “It’s about home, memory, and displacement—but it’s also about resistance, craft, and agency,” Kalo explains.
Since then, Kalo has participated in residencies across the region, including Bait Shouaib in Al Balad in Jeddah, where she transformed the archetypal Roshan balcony into a camera obscura. The resulting images, embedded in themes of visibility, privacy, and the female gaze, draw attention to the architectural negotiations of public and private space. In another performance from the same residency, she weaves herself into a wooden bed frame with green mesh ribbon—an exploration of containment and comfort, rest and restlessness.
On Recent Work:
These conceptual throughlines culminated in her most recent project during the Neom Residency, by Alserkal Advisory co-hosted with Madrid’s TBA21. In the desert expanse of northwestern Saudi Arabia, she unspooled a green screen across the land, invoking its potential as a chroma-key space—a surface onto which infinite readings may be projected. “It’s about the virtual and the real, about speculative geographies and what it means to draw a line in a landscape, one that has long been traversed by pilgrims, traders, and migrants,” she
says. The green screen becomes a literal and metaphorical surface of potential, inviting viewers to reimagine the body’s relation to place through mark-making within a contemporary lens.
Despite the geographical spread and media diversity of her practice, a quiet, persistent thread remains: embodied knowledge. “Some actions I feel I must do before I know why,” Kalo shares. “Then the work becomes about unpacking that impulse, enriching it.”
It’s this intuitive, almost archaeological approach to process that makes works like Ode to Elisar and Shattered Horizons—a poignant post-Beirut blast video piece—a kind of bedrock in her career. “There was no commission, no audience in mind. I made it simply because I had to,” she says. That instinct remains central to her current projects, including a new exhibition opening in Madrid this June. There, she will present Olive Leaves Memories, an accordion-style book of lumen prints and olive-dyed paper—an elegiac meditation on land, resistance, and the enduring symbolism of the olive tree. And a new series of camera obscura prints capturing a building that is a relic of the Civil War.
When asked if she has a favorite work, Kalo resists the notion. “Each piece reflects who I was at a particular moment. They’re all part of the journey.” A journey, indeed, marked not by linear progression but by recursive returns—home, memory, body, and land—constantly refracted through new materials and geographies. As Kalo continues her nomadic path through residencies and collaborations across Beirut, Riyadh, Jeddah, and beyond, one senses she is not merely producing work about displacement and belonging. She is enacting it—crafting, with quiet precision, new cartographies of memory and presence.
On the Biennale:
Her recent participation in the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah marked a significant moment in her career—not just for its scale, but for the conceptual and material explorations it demanded. The work she presented explored optics, vision, and framing—taking inspiration from 11th-century Arab polymath Ibn al-Haytham,
whose revolutionary treatises on light and sight reshaped scientific understanding. “His work on optics fundamentally changed how we understand sight, light and perception,” Kalo notes. “I wanted to create something that invites viewers to reassess the act of seeing itself today.”
Her piece, an immersive sculptural camera obscura—a physical and metaphysical space of inversion. Visitors enter the structure to find their environment visually flipped, east becomes west, sunrise becomes sunset. “The world feels flipped right now,” she says. “This work is about that: the disorientation, but also the opportunity to see differently.”
Though rooted in historical reference, the work is not nostalgic. It reframes the past to speak to the present and future, asking what it means to witness, to belong, and to reimagine. “I was interested in framing—not just in a visual sense, but in how we frame ourselves historically, culturally. The act of reframing is political, personal, and artistic all at once.”
The Biennale marked Kalo’s first foray into working with these materials and at this scale. “It made me reflect deeply on what I was doing and why.” It also catalyzed new forms of thinking—some of which will materialize in a forthcoming self-published zine: a blend of text, image, and poetry that expands on the installation’s conceptual underpinnings.
Through collaboration and dialogue—some poems are commissioned responses to the ideas explored in her piece—Kalo continues to stretch the frame, refusing to settle into one form or mode. Her practice remains in flux, sensitive to place, history, and the complex dance of light and memory.
What endures in her work is not certainty, but a commitment to asking the difficult, intimate questions: How do we see? What do we carry when we look? And where, ultimately, do we belong in the image?
