Sheffield Fringe

Rosalind Nashashibi

Rosalind Nashashibi (born 1973 in Croydon) studied art at Sheffield Hallam University from 1992 to 1995. In 1998 she began an MFA degree at The Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2000. She has exhibited widely and her solo shows include Tate Britain, London (2004); Kunsthalle, Basel (2004); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007); Presentation House, Vancouver (2008); ICA, London and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009); Murray Guy, New York (2013); and Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2013). In 2003 Nashashibi was the first woman to be awarded the Beck’s Futures Art Prize. In 2007 she exhibited as part of Scotland + Venice at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Nashashibi will be exhibiting two new works at documenta 14 (2017). She lives and works in London.

Electrical Gaza

Electrical Gaza | 2015 | HD | 17 min 53s

In Electrical Gaza, Nashashibi combines her footage of Gaza, and the fixer, drivers and translator who accompanied her there, with animated scenes. She presents Gaza as a place from myth; isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access and highly charged. Commissioned by the Trustees of Imperial War Museum. Produced by Kate Parker. Image courtesy of Rosalind Nashashibi and LUX, London.

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Object! On the Documentary as Art

Object! On the Documentary as Art | Panel presentation and discussion

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The State of Things

The State of Things | UK 2000 | SD | 3 min 30s

A Glasgow jumble sale set to an Egyptian classic love song from the 1920s.
Watching the film the audience is unsure where and when the action takes place, questioning the simplistic, unspecific and convenient conceptions of East and West.

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Eyeballing

Eyeballing | UK 2005 | 16mm | 10 min

The anthropomorphic city. A series of faces found in architectural facades or in objects around an apartment are juxtaposed with shots of policemen in uniform loitering around their precinct.

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Bachelor Machines Part 2

Bachelor Machines Part 2 | UK 2007 | 16mm (two-screen projection) | 5 min

“The screen on the left shows excerpts from Alexander Kluge’s Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed, 1968, and Nashashibi’s own re-filming of those scenes using artist Thomas Bayrle as a surrogate actor, while on the right are blurry shots taken from ‘Park Ambassador’ and ‘Eyeballing’. Thomas Bayrle’s voiceover narrates an account of what he calls the ‘pact with [the] devil’. Bayrle argues the catholic rosary is man’s first machine—the Renaissance’s answer to automised prayer. As the voiceover reaches its climax, the images begin to sharpen, the edits quicken, and we are returned to a state of crisp vision.” Isla Leaver-Yap for MAP

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This Quality

This Quality | UK 2010 | 16mm | 5 min

This Quality is a film shot in downtown Cairo. It comprises two halves: the first shows a 30-something woman looking directly at the camera, and sometimes acknowledging the existence of others around her who we cannot see. She has a beautiful face with eyes which seem to see internally rather than outwardly, they almost have the appearance of being painted on, suggesting the blindness of a mythological seer. The second half shows a series of parked cars covered with fabric. Each car suggests a sightless face, as the fabric stretched around the machine turns it into a face but also seems to hood the car so that it is conspicuously hidden, like a child covering his eyes.

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Carlo’s Vision

Carlo’s Vision | Italy 2011 | 16mm | 11 min

Carlo’s Vision is a 16mm film based on an episode in the unfinished novel Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The episode which inspired Rosalind Nashashibi’s film describes the vision experienced by Carlo, the protagonist of Petrolio. Rather than filming the vision exactly as it is described in the novel, she has taken the protagonists, the props and the location, imported them into the present day and used them as the departure point for her film, thus using a template from the early seventies and employing it in exactly the same location in 2011. The result, Carlo’s Vision, is a mixture of observational documentary and fiction – in which Carlo is pulled along Rome’s Via Torpignattara on a director’s dolly, observing the long march of a young man, The Shit, and his fiancée Cinzia. (more)

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Lovely Young People

Lovely Young People | UK 2012 | HD | 13 min 30s

Commissioned by Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and Scottish Ballet. Sound is used to draw us into the different perspectives within the film – whether that of the dancers or the visitors, ‘the insiders or the intruders’ – while Nashashibi’s camera allows us close-up, lingering views of individuals more normally seen at a remove. The comments on the youth and grace of the dancers, like those used for the title, or comments on their seemingly superhuman strength and endurance, are instances of a chorus-effect, a revealing of efforts of interpretation as well of efforts of looking. The chorus effect, via the ‘gods’, features first in Nashashibi’s previous film, Carlo’s Vision.

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