Exhibition Works
In Rehearsal
2009, Silver gelatine prints and sound recording
The exhibition opens with a new series of photographic works by Nashashibi, entitled In Rehearsal (2009). This group of over a hundred images depicts a rehearsal in Berlin, of a work by Tillman Hecker composed from fragments of Mozart operas, and is accompanied by a sound recording of the same event. Although Nashashibi is best known for her films, her works on paper-which include collages as well as photographs-draw attention to ideas and images that recur within her practice. The notion of rehearsal is very important to the artist, who is interested in what is known in the theatrical world as 'physicalisation' whereby people are transformed into characters.
Eyeballing
2005, 16mm film with sound
The second room of the exhibition features three films, all made since 2005 and all containing inter-related imagery. The earliest of these, Eyeballing (2005), is a pivotal film in Nashashibi's practice, marking the start of a turn away from the observational mode of her earlier output, and towards a more intuitive form of working. The ten-minute film juxtaposes scenes of New York policemen with the serendipitous 'faces' that Nashashibi's camera finds in the physical fabric of their city. Sequences shot outside a police station in lower Manhattan, where Nashashibi captures the officers off-duty, are inter-cut with static images of fire hydrants, shop windows and electric sockets, objects in which we detect the basic schematic of a face. The film plays on the creation and recognition of personae through uniforms and masks, its title hinting at the sometimes aggressive act of scrutinising others.
Bachelor Machines Part 2
2007, Two-screen 16mm film with sound
Another film exhibited here is Bachelor Machines Part 2 (2007), a double-projection piece shown in a five-minute loop. The left screen features scenes taken from Alexander Kluge's Artists Under The Big Top: Perplexed (1968), and is inter-cut with Nashashibi's own re-enactments of Kluge's film, employing the artist Thomas Bayrle and his wife Helke (the first time Nashashibi has staged scenes for the camera). At the same time, the right hand screen features scenes lifted from previous works by Nashashibi (including Eyeballing), many of which are shown out-of-focus. To this overlapping material is added a voiceover taken from a talk by Bayrle, in which he expounds a vision of a world in which Christian ritual leads inevitably to the industrial revolution, and to some kind of unspecified mechanical apocalypse.
Masculine communities, and the performance of masculinity, are explored in both Eyeballing and Bachelor Machines Part 2. In the title of the latter Nashashibi invokes the Duchampian notion of sexed and erotic mechanisms, and her work re-frames Bayrle's account of the mechanics of power to include ideas of gender and desire [1]. It should be noted that Kluge's film, on which Nashashibi's work draws, is the story of Leni, who struggles - against apparently insurmountable odds - to reinvent the circus that she inherits on the death of her father. The way in which Nashashibi uses her camera to co-opt existing narratives, weaving them into her own, suggests an identification with Leni, and an appreciation of the feminist critique of cinema as the ultimate 'bachelor machine'.
Footenote
2008, 16mm film
The third work screened in this room is Footnote (2008). This one-minute film is another piece involving sequences staged by the Bayrles, but this time it is Helke Bayrle who takes centre stage. Sitting up in bed, she is reading a magazine when her eyes drop to the bottom of the page - to read a footnote - the sequence is interrupted by the unexpected image of an ornamental garden frog. Like the transition from main text to footnote, this cut suggests a jump between different levels of reality - a recurring theme in Nashashibi's work.
Abbeys
2006, Series of four black and white photographs
The Concourse contains a sequence of four monumental black and white photographs, entitled Abbeys (2006), which are based on images found by the artist in an old photographic album. The series continues the anthropomorphic dynamic of eyeballing, as Nashashibi has inverted each of the images in order to reveal rudimentary faces hidden in the recesses of these ecclesiastical buildings. The works are highly uncanny, as these ghostly portraits refuse to drop back into the architecture once they have been spied: an expression of the power of Nashashibi's seemingly casual authorship.
The Prisoner
2008, 16mm film with sound
Nashashibi's exploration of vision and control continues in the upper gallery, where the first room contains The Prisoner (2008), a five-minute, double-projection film work. The camera follows a woman, played by the artist Anna Gaskell, around the brutalist architectural landscape of London's Southbank Centre. The two-screen display of Bachelor Machines Part 2 is adapted here, but this time creates a more paranoid sense of repetition and doubling. The swelling sound of Rachmaninoff's The Isle Of The Dead vies with the sound of the woman's clicking heels, as well as with the clattering noise of the projectors.
The Prisoner is based on a sequence from Chantal Ackerman's film La Captive (2000), which employs the same Hitchcock-style score, and which itself borrows its scenario from the The Prisoner (1923), the fifth book in Proust's In Search Of Lost Time. Threading a single loop of film through two adjacent projectors, Nashashibi creates a six-second time lag between the left and right screens, the delay becoming an expression of the physical distance which the filmstrip must cross between the two machines. The film is Nashashibi's comment on narratives of sexual compulsion and control, its disorientating visual and aural structure, and its use of our point of view rather than that of an onscreen observer, creating a strange sense of proximity and complicity. The Prisoner is an example of Nashashibi's move away from the static camera work that characterised her earlier pieces, and towards a more fully staged type of filmmaking.
Jack Straw's Castle
2009, 16mm film with sound
The final work in the exhibition, Jack Straw's Castle (2009), has been specially commissioned by the ICA and Bergen Kunsthall. Using footage shot in and around a public park in London, Nashashibi interlaces shots from real life-including sequences shot in a cruising area - with staged scenarios involving a cast of non-actors. The real life sequences are mainly from the daytime, whereas the dramatised elements take place at night. The key protagonist in the staged sequences is played by the artist's mother, Pauline Nashashibi. Walking through the park at dusk, she is brought into a clearing in the woods occupied by a film crew, becoming an observer of - and participant in - their transformation of the forest into a highly artificial site. Jack Straw's Castle articulates the dream space of cinema, in which camera and desire conspire to bring about a metamorphosis. As Nashashibi has said about her filmic work, "The shoot is the magical part; it is a performance and a ritual during which i am attempting to connect with where i am and with what happens... an extra dimension that goes beyond recording truth happens through filming. The camera is a magical instrument rather than a truth-recording device."
All works courtesy the artist and doggerfisher, Edinburgh.
[1] Duchamp's notion of the Bachelor Machine is manifest in his celebrated work The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23). Nashashibi first used the phrase in the title of Bachelor Machines Part 1, which is being screened in the cinema programme that accompanies this exhibition. The film was shot on board an all-male cargo ship.