TASHARUK

GENDER, CULTURE AND RESISTANCES IN PALESTINE

النوع والثقافة والمقاومة في فلسطين

Rosalind Nashashibi

روزاليند نشاشيبي

“People come and go in these scenarios, they work their rhythms; it is part of the fabric that I am looking at and constructing. The one with a name is a small part of the one what happens, just like the looks and movements. In this type of investigation, words can remain as they are, but translation (adding text to the subtitles) changes their relative importance and brings reading into the viewer’s cognitive process”

Biography

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based filmmaker and painter of Palestinian origin.

The filmmaker uses documentary and experimental languages in her audiovisual work, where real-life observations merge with paintings, elements of fiction and science fiction to propose other models of collective representation. Rosalind Nashashibi describes the qualities of experience, things and places and exposes universal questions about work, curation and institutions.

Her latest short film, Electrical Gaza,was filmed in Palestine during Israel’s military Operation Protective Edge in June and July 2014. In this documentary, Rosalind Nashashibi presents the Gaza Strip with careful images and still shots of extreme beauty, as a space seen from myth, isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access and highly symbolically charged. In her documentary Hreash House,she shows us the life of a large Palestinian family living in a concrete block of flats in Nazareth during the Eid holiday season after Ramadan. The short film Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Officetransports us to a hot, slow afternoon in a neighbourhood built to be a utopian suburb for the employees of the Palestinian Post Office: a neighbourhood that becomes a no-man’s land, in Area C, between East Jerusalem and occupied Ramallah. Rosalind Nashashibi presents her first film without subtitles, giving more importance to images, spaces, tempos and sensations than to the words spoken by her characters.

Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings find abstract forms in substitution for language. Her works have been exhibited internationally and she represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. In 2003, she was the first woman to win the Becks Futuras award, she was also an artist-in-residence at the National Gallery for the years 2019-21 and is currently a professor at Goldsmiths in London.

Filmography

— Electrical Gaza, documentary experimental, Palestina, 17min, 2015.

— Hreash House, documentary experimental, Palestina, 20min, 2004.

— Dahiet Al Bareed, District of the Post Office, documentary experimental, Palestina, 7min, 2002.