Rosalind Nashashibi: FILMN YOUR LIFE WITH FASHION

This was a retrospective selection of Nashashibi’s films rarely encountered together in the cinema context. The films were screened in their original 16mm format, followed by a discussion between Nashashibi and Dan Kidner.

In Nashashibi’s work, the ‘real’ world ‘out there’ comes into sensuous contact with the viewer’s equally real internal world. Her work tackles diverse subjects from a Scottish ballet school to the Gaza Strip and can be characterised by the resolutely persistent gaze of her camera eye. This gaze circumvents the routine solicitation of the viewer’s empathic identification and demands from the viewer to consider the degree of their participation in the films’ construction. In other words, the films activate what we bring to the viewing experience, apropos of pre-existing mental and physical images and associations.