Rosalind Nashashibi


Layla Rosalind Nashashibi is a Palestinian-English artist based in London.
Nashashibi works mainly with 16mm film but also makes paintings and prints. Her work often deals with everyday observations merged with mythological elements, considering the relationships and moments between community and extended family

Early life and education

Nashashibi was born in 1973 to a Palestinian father and Irish mother, in Croydon, a large town in South London. received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fine art from Sheffield Hallam University, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom in 1995. She completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at The Glasgow School of Art in 2000. During this time she spent three months in CalArts as part of a masters exchange program.

Work

Much of Nashashibi's work consists of films of everyday life in urban environments. She works mainly with 16 mm film as well as photography, print and painting. Her films often use various narrative techniques in order to link staged scenes with imagery of real life.
Solo exhibitions include: Two Tribes, Murray Guy, New York ; Electrical Gaza, Imperial War Museum, London, 2015; and The Painter and The Delivery Man Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp
Abbeys comprises a series of four black and white photographs that each depicts an upside-down view of an abbey’s archway that when flipped as such reveals an anthropomorphic face.
The State of Things is a black-and-white film of old ladies at a Salvation Army jumble sale with a love song by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum on the soundtrack. The exact location of the film is unclear, and Nashashibi has said that many people, when first seeing the grainy footage, assume the women to be from some non-British culture or from an earlier time.
Dahiet a Bareed, District of the Post Office was filmed in the West Bank in an area designed by the artist's grandfather. The film is of people playing football, having their hair cut and so on. Midwest and Midwest Field depict life in Omaha, Nebraska.
She works collaboratively with artist Lucy Skaer under the name Nashashibi/Skaer

Major awards

In 2003, Nashashibi won the Beck's Futures prize, the first woman to do so, for The State of Things. In 2017 she was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Collections

Her work is held in the collection of the Tate.