Film-maker Rosalind Nashashibi stakes out public places before she starts filming, she tells Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
Rosalind Nashashibi, the winner of this year's prestigious Beck's Futures award, makes short art films. She says they're about "how people use the kind of spaces - like neighbourhoods, cafés, hospitals, Salvation Army halls - that are made for them". She stakes out these spaces, gets to know them, becomes part of the furniture, an observer who is noticed but not minded, and starts filming. The material she accumulates is edited according to her own instinctive feeling for form, and the result is usually a narrative patchwork. That is, we look in on many narratives in progress, but there is no overall, conventional narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end.
They are not fly-on-the-wall exposés. When she works with hospitals, as she does in Humaniora, she is not in search of ER-style footage. Rather she observes people waiting, talking, entering or leaving these imposing buildings.
Using several hospitals in England and Scotland, she generates an overwhelming impression of institutional spaces. Hospitals are daunting places. Her choice of a chapter heading from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as a title provides a clue to her intentions. Mann's novel is set in a TB sanatorium in which the patients seem to enter another time zone. Hospitals are places where our habitual sense of time is disrupted, where we wait, where we surrender ourselves to another temporal order, one outside of our control. Which brings up a recurrent subtext of Nashashibi's work, which has to do with power: just whose spaces are public spaces?
"While I'm interested in how people move in relation to the architecture of these spaces," she explains, "the films are mainly about time. I'm trying to get a sense of time in those settings and capture that on film." So putting her work together we get a cumulative vision of people spending, passing or perhaps enduring time in different kinds of social space. Hence the logic of her editing, which is necessarily inconclusive in dramatic terms, in the sense that "it's like a piece of music". It has an intuitive, emotional structure.
In outline, her work might sounds like those nightmarish art videos where the "artist" just presses Record and subjects us to hours of grainy nothingness. In fact her films are edited very intensively and rhythmically, and she doesn't work with video at all. She shoots film, on a 16mm Bolex camera, which imposes its own severe time constraints.
"I use three-minute reels of film, but it's a wind-up camera, so I'm limited to a shot-length of about 28 seconds. There's never a shot that lasts longer. But in fact 28 seconds is a really long time on film."
While the films eventually end up on DVD, she likes the quality of the images on film stock as opposed to videotape, as well as the constraints of the technology. "You don't have instant playback, you send the film off to the lab for processing. I like that period of uncertainty. I'm often surprised by what I see when the film is developed. For me, video has an inherently voyeuristic look about it, partly because of CCTV and television. It's not that I'm a film purist - I don't like the clackety-clack of a projector in the gallery, for example, which is why I use DVD. I just like certain things to do with film as a medium."
Four of her films, including Humaniora are showing at Temple Bar. In Midwest, shot in Nebraska, we look at people hanging out in archetypical Midwestern surroundings, eating in diners, chatting on street corners, looking at the world go by. There is an intimation that these people, like Mann's sanatorium dwellers, stand apart from the hustle and bustle of things, perhaps by virtue of marginalisation or disadvantage - the question of power, again. The same is true of Blood and Fire (the Salvation Army motto), which provides an account of mealtime in a hostel. Each individual work is like an island in time. The odd thing is that Nashashibi manages to make us acutely aware of the passing of time without putting us through an endurance test in the way that much video and performance art, alas, does.
The remaining film Dahiet Al Bareed (The District of the Post Office), reflects her Palestinian heritage. It is set in a West Bank area of Jerusalem once designed and developed by her grandfather. Now it is something of a no-man's-land. But Nashashibi doesn't depict military activities, tanks or bulldozers. She focuses on aspects of daily, communal life: a game of football in the street, men hanging around the barber shop, a pile of rubbish set alight. There is an underlying, nagging sense that all is not well, that these people exist in a kind of suspension.
"I am drawn," she agrees, "to institutional time, to . . . what could I call it? Non-constructive time, when people are not working, when they're engaged in some entirely routine activity, those moments of not going anywhere in particular. When we're working we all have this presentable self. We're quite different when we're twiddling our thumbs, when we're not quite sure what we're doing. Time stretches." Nashishibi used to live in London, and liked living in London. "But I found it a bad place to work." Partly because there was so much going on. So she moved to Scotland, to Glasgow, and is based there still. "For the sake of the work, and for the hill-walking, though I don't do so much of that any more." The work has taken over, which is a good complaint for an artist.
Next, she is going back to Jerusalem. "I'm going to Nazareth. To a place that is unusual in that it has maintained its identity. A friend of the family lives there." She is aware of the security issues involved in working in Israel and the West Bank. "It's difficult to work there, it's tense. There's a struggle to get hold of film, and to get it out without it being destroyed by X-ray. But it was a very rich experience for me in terms of the family. It was a wonderful trip. I'm nervous about going back, but I'm looking forward to it as well."
- Rosalind Nashashibi's films can be seen at Temple Bar Gallery until December 6th, tel: 01-6710073