Rosalind Nashashibi: 3 Films
20.02–12.04.2009
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart is pleased to present Rosalind Nashashibi’s frist solo exhibition in Germany. The British artist is known for her conceptual film works, collages and photographs. The exhibition contains an overview on her oeuvre with a special focus on her filmic works.
The exhibition core forms 16 mm projections of Nashashibi’s recent films Eyeballing (16mm, 2005), Bachelor Machines Part 1 (16mm, 2007) and Footnote (16mm, 2008). A separate film program contains further film and video works. All works deal with the psychological atmosphere of seemingly ordinary places and objects. Although the films are set in very different contexts such as life on a cargo ship (Bachelor Machines Part 1) or the dreamy state between being awake and asleep (Footnote), the director’s analytic view and the elegant, dense filmic language are visible in both films.
The line-up of different films from different work stages directs the attention on recurring topics and formal strategies in Nashashibi’s works such as the use of anthropomorphic images. The exhibition design relates to the artist’s work principle, who integrates own, older works into her new works. Nashashibi’s most famous film is Eyeballing, that contains static shots of architecture that ressembles abstracted faces and distanced shots of a police station in Lower Manhattan. Facial motifs appear again in Bachelor Machines Part 1, however, in a different context: an orgasm is morphed into a cargo ship. All films play with the perception of relations in ordinary forms such as the human body. Nashashibi purposely edits interceptions into the sound and image track in order to create an additional semantic level.
Rosalind Nashashibi (born 1973 in Croydon, England) lives in London. She took part in Manifesta 7 in Trient and in Tate Britain in London. She regularly collaborates with artists Lucy Skaer, for example within the frame of 5. Belrin Biennale and at CAC Bretigny near Paris. In 2007, she represented Scotland at the 52. Biennale di Venezia. This September, she will open a solo exhibition at ICA London.