Irish-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi works across painting and filmmaking, merging these disciplines to explore themes of time, ritual, and human relationships that combine the urgency of the contemporary with art historical notions of composition. She gained international recognition in the early 2000s for her observational films that blur the line between documentary and artistic expression. Her paintings often feature abstracted figures and forms rendered in vivid colors, while her films are known for their meditative quality and careful attention to everyday moments and social dynamics.
Analogue textures of 16mm film follow a family home as a significant site to a Palestinian family residing in the city of Nazareth. This work was filmed in 2002, during Ramadan and concurrent to the second intifada. This film is a document of a particularly harsh moment for the Palestinian community inside Israel who suffer an occupation of the soul in search for any form of normality during this month-long time of fasting. The home becomes a shelter providing safety and togetherness. Rosalind Nashashibi’s signature painterly compositions capture the motions of a non-nuclear family as they traverse an intimate architecture that serves as a nexus for their connections to each other as well as a wider community. Members of the home, friends, and visitors enter and exit in order to perform rituals, exchange information, and share food at the table. Some of the last scenes of the film show the Iftar when all of the daughters of the family return to their childhood home with their new families.
Nashashibi enters as an observer who captures a way of life that has been maintained despite all efforts of its eradication. The concept of a modern nuclear family and Western philosophies of space are markedly altered, and instead, we see multiple generations cohabiting physically and temporally in order to adapt to roles for the family to best maintain itself. Nazareth lies within a part of the Palestinian land that was integrated into 1948 Israel. This families’ history is not told in the film, but their motions and silences reveal a weight of time and history present in their everyday lives and marked with a solemn silence during Ramadan. Like any Palestinian family that remains in this territory, they had to find a way to avoid death at the hands of the Haganah militia during the Nakba, and keep their home through a tedious process of bureaucracy by proving that they had never left the boundaries of the state of Israel during the time set out by the Absentee Property Law. These experiences might have made the home even more central to the family that seems to inhabit it constantly, to move from one place to another throughout the day and construct facilities for large gatherings.
Rosalind Nashashibi / Gaza, 2021
Through painting, Nashashibi finds an entirely different way to reflect on Palestine. Through abstraction, composition, and color, Paintings for Palestine depict the potential politics of expression. In this work, a red triangle emerges from the left hand of the painting like the one in the Palestinian flag. It pierces through two oblong shapes that could represent the two fragments of Palestine that live in fenced isolation from each other. A drop of water caresses the forms, a tear falling from the sky that will provide nutrients to these sprouting seeds searching for the horizon in de-oxygenated air. The smoggy grey shades that pollute the upper half of the painting reference the toxic environments of warfare and ecological degradation that children grow up with in Gaza long before the start of the current genocide. These purposefully noxious surroundings create physical and psychological damage in children whose opportunities for a decent future were already agonizingly slim. Nashashibi imagines the paintings that she made after 7 October 2023 as a cloth that is offered to the people of Gaza with the following words: “if only they could have some comfort, a warm bed, a shower, a beautiful cloth to wrap their possessions in.”
This painting is a prelude for a series of paintings about UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine) and what has been done to this institution in the past months by countries like the UK. In a solo exhibition presented at GRIMM Gallery in Amsterdam, compositions of swans expressed through tears and frustration the sight of empty pots of aid with the acronym of UNRWA placed within the borders of the frame. This series repeats the motif of two crossed swans that represent solidarity and care for others. UNRWA has worked on the ground in Palestine since 1948 to address the hardships of displacement that have faced so many of the Palestinian people since then. They register refugees, bring them shelter and aid, provide education for children, as well as food and other basic necessities that are out of reach for uprooted families. This series appeals to our bare minimum of humanity - the sustaining of this agency was the least that Western governments could do who have been complicit for decades in the forced expulsion of innocent people from their homes. Due to pressure from the Israeli government, many Western countries suspended their funding for this life saving organisation including the UK, the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, and France. After the initial announcements, many of these same countries quietly reinstated the funding after evidence that the claims made by the state of Israel had no legal basis for the suspension of aid.
Rosalind Nashashibi / Swans and Pots (four), 2024
Rosalind Nashashibi / Swans and Pots (slipper), 2024
Rosalind Nashashibi / Swans and Pots (two), 2024
Rosalind Nashashibi / Special Cloth for a UN worker, 2024
Rosalind Nashashibi / Special Cloth for a UN worker, 2024 (detail)
Rosalind Nashashibi / Swans and Pots (four), 2024 (detail)
Rosalind Nashashibi / Cockerel Caught, 2024
