A new instalment in our on-going series Films in Dialogue
The films and videos of Basma Alsharif explore the subjective experience of political landscape, investigating the links between a geographical space and its mental representation. Born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, Alsharif’s nomadic existence – brought up in France and the United States, she has lived in Beirut, Amman and Cairo and is currently based between Los Angeles and Paris – is deeply embedded in her work. Whether working with photography, film, video, sound, text or language, the representation of Palestine as a place where the constant feeling of threat and the ever-changing geographical borders produce a sense of unreal is a crucial subject in Alsharif’s work and her on-going interrogation of the relationship between history and the human condition.
In Dirty Pictures, the seventh episode in the Hotel Diaries series by British artist filmmaker John Smith, the filmmaker moves from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, encountering a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. John Smith draws a very fine line between the personal and the political, the intimate and the global, oscillating with humour between the two. Dearticulating the relationship between sound and image, reality and construction, Smith – just as Alsharif – makes work that by looking inwards towards the domestic and the self, opens up to the universal.
This special screening of their work in dialogue will be followed by a conversation between Basma Alsharif and John Smith.
Programme
Dirty Pictures (John Smith, 2007, 15 min)
Home Movies Gaza (Basma Alsharif, 2013, 24 min)
Flag Mountain (John Smith, 2010, 8 min)
A Field Guide to the Ferns (Basma Alsharif, 2015, 11 min)
Dark Light (John Smith, 2014, 4 min)
