Rosalind Nashashibi
Tulips & Roses, Brussels, Belgium
Rosalind Nashashibi, ‘Woman Behind a Cushion’, installation view (2010)
Rosalind Nashashibi’s exhibition, ‘Woman Behind a Cushion’, inaugurates Tulips & Roses’ new gallery in Brussels (it has moved from Vilnius) and is an uncharacteristic show for the British artist. Nashashibi, known for her almost exclusive use of photography and film, instead presents objects alongside films in this ensemble. The outcome is relatively inconspicuous: a few screen prints, a photograph, a found image, and a small sculpture, while the films – observational, intuitive and anthropological – are closer to her earlier work.
The choice to present such a sparse installation could relate to Nashashibi’s current investigations into things that remain unseen. Just as her films evoke the lives of human and anthropomorphic subjects devoid of productive activity, these works hint at hidden bodies and the act of seeing them from inside out. In the gallery’s main room, a deep grey velvet stage curtain disguises the street front window (itself a sheath encasing an exhibition based on sheaths) and an A4 black and white photocopy of David Hockney’s etching Rapunzel Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1969) is pinned to the entry wall. Suspended next to it is a horse’s hood draped over a wooden plinth. Titled The World Cracked Open (2010), the dual piece crystallizes the scene in the fairy tale of Rapunzel, in which her Prince gallops up on his horse beneath the tower where her braided hair hangs. Narrative aside, Nashashibi seems to be interested in the Hockney print for its formal qualities and encapsulation of a moment, alongside the horse hood, which reverberates against other poetic reiterations of covers, dresses and enveloped bones on view in this show.
Sunspot 2 (2010)
Such is the case of the c-print, Sunspot 2 (2010), hanging on the facing wall. It depicts a clunker car adorned in a garment typical of vehicles stationed in and around Cairo (which we learn from an accompanying film in the basement). The ink splattered onto the print creates the impression of phantom limbs sprouting out of the car, as if it were about to elevate and scurry off on its freshly birthed appendages. Adjacent abstract grey-ochre and lilac unframed screen prints, titled Thought Shape: Grey and Ochre and Thought Shape: Lilac (both 2004), complement the gallery’s refurbished mosaic floor, and again suggest other dressings. Their contorted shapes formally echo the contours of the horse hood sculpture, though they also portray what could happen if one were to sculpt the inner lining of a thought, and render its sleek curvature as it bubbles in the brain.
Nashashibi is at her best when making films, such as the two displayed here. The first, an early work titled Stone and Table (1995), shows alternating black and white close-ups of an ordinary stone and table, whose function or purpose is obscured. By filming them, she attains a sort of bleak abstraction in which the eerie shadows lurking on the stone and table’s periphery create an ethereal otherworldliness. Viewing them, one is drawn to the sense of animate life that Nashashibi attaches to them. The second film, This Quality (2010), is the most subdued and elegant of the two. It depicts an Egyptian woman staring into the camera, her gaze occasionally drifting away. Looking closer, her eyes don’t seem to belong to her, but emit a glamour which is more fitting if we view them, as the artist remarks, as ‘a word or diagram indicating eyes, rather than eyes themselves’. Her portrait is followed by long still individual takes of automobiles sheathed by striped, earth-tinted car covers. The cars sit amidst a clamour of beeping horns, their robes drooping and swaying in the dusty wind. Before Nashashibi’s camera, recondite subjects, inanimate and animate, hidden and unveiled, appear as if they’ve been poetically assembled for our view.
Jennifer Teets
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