ARTIST/FILMMAKER Basma Alsharif presented a selection of short films that explore Palestine's political history through visceral landscapes reflecting on the human condition and the future beyond history, and engaged in conversation with Hamid Dabashi. On the next evening, she gave a Master Class in conversation with James Schamus.
Basma ALSHARIF is an Artist/Filmmaker born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, raised between France and the US. Since receiving a Master of Fine Arts in 2007 from the University of Illinois at Chicago, she developed her practice nomadically between Chicago, Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, the Gaza Strip and Paris. Basma's work centers on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes, natural environments and history. She works in cinema, photography and installation. Major exhibitions include: Le Prix Découverte des Rencontres d'Arles, les Module at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, the Jerusalem Show, Yamagata Documentary Film Festival, the Berlinale, the Sharjah Biennial, Videobrasil, and Manifesta 8. She received a jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial 9, the Marion MacMahon award at Images, and was awarded the Marcelino Botin Visual Arts grant. Basma is represented by Galerie Imane Farés in Paris, distributed by Video Data Bank and Arsenal, and is now based in Los Angeles.
16mm HD transfer ~ 10 minutes “Primitive savagery meets the brutality of the modern world in Ruggero Deodato’s timeless slice of visceral horror”. Cannibal Holocaust is revived deep in the New Hampshire woods where apathy and violence are blurred.
HD video ~ 24 minutes Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civiliza- tion. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of hu- man rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.
SD Video ~ 10 minutes An unnamed man narrates his failure to write an a-political love story in Beirut Lebanon. His voice weaves through images, letters, and songs that creates their own story.
15 minutes A film on the perpetual present as an enactment of the concept of the eternal return.
SD Video ~ 19 minutes Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved to- gether to unfold the narrative of an anony- mous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into po- litical ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the vi- sual fails to communicate the tragic.
