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December 12, 2019 – Review
Basma Alsharif’s “A Philistine”
Chris Sharratt
An ever-spiraling conflict, a splintered diasporic identity, the subjectivity of experience, the psychology of displacement: in the work of the Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif this heavy load is unpacked and sifted, as history and geography are questioned and clichés resisted. In her attempts to challenge didactic accounts of history and the misrepresentation they can engender, Alsharif often hits rewind. Moving backward in order to propel a narrative forward is a recurring motif in her lens-based work, a device she uses to powerful effect in her compelling 77-minute feature debut Ouroboros (2017), which opens with reversed drone footage of waves rolling away from the Gaza shore before panning back inland across the beach, a busy road, and city blocks.
In “A Philistine,” presented across three distinct gallery spaces at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, Alsharif plays with time in differing ways. A screening room with a two-seater sofa shows three looped short videos that bring the domestic and geopolitical together. In Further Than The Eye Can See (2012), the story begins with Alsharif’s grandmother’s arrival in Cairo after being exiled from Jerusalem in 1948 and ends with her birth in Jerusalem 11 years earlier. Told in English by a male narrator as …