بسمة الشريف
Biography
Basma Alsharif is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker of Palestinian origin. She was born in Kuwait and grew up and studied in France and the United States, travelling the world on a US passport. Basma Alsharif cannot enter the country of her parents, nor the land where her grandparents live and that she used to visit as a child.
Through video art and cinema installations, the filmmaker deals with essential problems about the human condition in relation to changes in geopolitical landscapes. Her installations have been exhibited internationally in contemporary art museums.
The poet Mahmoud Darwish argued that “the metaphor of Palestine is stronger and more pervasive than Palestine itself”. Basma Alsharif’s work calls out to the generation of young Palestinian artists that the Palestinian perspective is, in fact, stronger than the Palestinian metaphor. In Basma’s films, history and space are represented with their multiple layers and dimensions, images are allowed to be seen through other images, frames are superimposed on other frames, space becomes familiar but anonymous, urban life and rural life dissolve within each other and the present and the future are intertwined in the same timeline. The filmmaker is simultaneously confronted with a neo-orientalist social interpretation and her self-orientalist projection. That is why her work does not emerge to recognise the Palestinian image but to urgently interrogate these social and political projections, the essence of these images vis-à-vis their own representation.
Basma AlSharif lives in Berlin.