Output details

Rosalind Nashashibi

Solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and touring to Bergen Kunsthall.

The solo exhibition was curated across the entire building of the ICA and Bergen Kunsthall. It included two new commissions: films that juxtaposed the observation of reality with framed or fictional elements within the same public space. This confrontation of the real and the constructed channelled the friction that resides in the border of the two realities and two genres of filmmaking. In two of the films I used a taboo or illegal mode of filming to invite a transgression into the film’s making, in 'Eyeballing' I filmed NYPD officers in close quarters and in 'Jack Straw’s Castle' gay cruisers on Hampstead Heath. These transgressions were not an end in themselves, but part of a research process where intuition, trust and heightened level of connection and excitement were all part of the process. In 'Eyeballing' the aim was to put together two elements that I had mentally linked without yet analysing or understanding the outcome. I juxtaposed the uniformed officers, their exaggerated and mimetic body language and glances, with my finding of ‘faces’ in the city’s facades. This was the beginning of a new montage language where I invited the viewer to make cognitive leaps with me in order to question the gap in meaning laid open by the juxtaposition. In 'Eyeballing' the question was one of control and the gaze, in 'Jack Straw’s Castle', also divided into two halves in the same public space, it was about codified desire and film making itself.

In this exhibition I was the first person to continually pass one film strip through two projectors, so showing the same film on two screens, but one a few seconds delayed behind the other. This was significant in the content of the film but also in that the filmic time lost became a physically measurable space, that between the two projectors, so questioning and transforming the idea of intangible experience into something almost graspable.