The new exhibition by Rosalind Nashashibi, a Scottish artist who was the recipient of the 2003 Becks Futures prize, deals with both the performative element of humanity and what is revealed when it doesn’t know it’s being watched. Both public and exclusive places are pictured, from a busy street corner to a private bedroom. All the works are about the connections or otherwise between things, whether it is the apparently arbitrary arrangement of a building’s features or the disconnect between the drab appearance of out-of-costume opera singers and the sound of their voices.
As I walked into the exhibition at the ICA galleries I heard a tinkle of piano and the sound of a woman singing opera, sudden and sublime. As I wondered where it was coming from it emerged that the first room shows photos of opera singers rehearsing on a stripped stage, all the artifice of their craft taken away. Nashashibi is known for a documentary-style examination of human beings observed unaware, for example in her short film “The States of Things”, which showed people sifting through clothes at a jumble sale. The beauty and warmth of the recorded singing, the final product as it were, was in stark contrast to the rather bleak and seemingly uncomposed photographs of the singers in rehearsal, whom we saw from every angle in a huge number of photos in the series.
Also on display was Nashashibi’s film “Eyeballing”, a series of shots trained on various buildings, every day objects and street furniture that contained the components of a human face. The faces were generally cheerful and the deadpan nature of the still camera and the occasional incursion of everyday human activity on the unconcerned, smiling faces made it funny, in the way that a running joke builds up over time. For some reason I found the little face Nashashibi documented on the back of her electric toothbrush especially funny and endearing. These parts of “Eyeballing” made me wonder if we were being asked to question our anthropomorphication of objects to make it easier to live in urban environments, or whether architects and designers include these details, consciously or otherwise, for the same reasons.
Cut in between the faces are scenes filmed at a New York police station, with a huge blue crest emblazoned on its doors, giving the slightly fantastical feel of a portal to an unknown space. Unlike the water fountains, wood knots and windows of the other scenes, these facings are unsmiling and it is here that the “eyeballing” suddenly seems a little darker and more threatening. The narrative tension is ramped during these scenes because occasionally one of the police officers, who we aren’t sure are aware they are being filmed, will look directly into the camera, just for a split second – it’s strangely thrilling. In fact, Nashashibi was filming illegally under a pretext.
A series of still photographs echo the themes of the film: upside-down church vaults lead your eye to look for more faces. According to the literature, an influence of Nashashibi’s while making some of the work in this show is Proust, particularly although indirectly on “The Prisoner”, a film of a woman’s high-heeled feet walking and pausing, allowing the viewer to suspect that she knows she is being watched – a little like the NYPD. The film is a loose reconstruction from a film
The exhibition will run September 10 – November 1.
Tags:
art, film, ICA, Rosalind Nashashibi
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