Basma Alsharif

Installed right outside the elevators was Girls Only (2014). On the walls were framed, reproduced posters from various Olympic Games in the 1910s and ’20s portraying solely muscular male figures, symbols of masculine ideals that in turn gesture at patriarchal power. On the posters, strips of ink blocked out the words “Olympic Games.” In the video projected in between the poster-lined walls, a woman is shown rhyming words related to the culture of supreme masculinity at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, the site of the first modern Olympics. Reacting to the dominant male-oriented discourses surrounding historical events, Alsharif disrupts the flow of patriarchal thoughts and conventions through reversed echoes and a subtle yet sharp sense of humor.

Trompe l’Oeil (2016) similarly functions at the crossroads of past and present. The work features several approximately life-size mural prints of a Los Angeles apartment’s interiors and a television playing a video of mundane activities like walking and chopping onions. Hung salon-style on adjacent walls and varying in size, a selection of images, acquired with and without permission from The British Library and the Imperial War Museum Archives in the United Kingdom, eagerly speaks to the fraught colonial history of the Middle East. By virtue of contrast, the non-placeness of what resembles a small part of a living room and the video’s quotidian details, vis-à-vis the dark historical backdrop, give weight to what these photographs represent: indelible evidence of colonial violence and political entitlement.

In dialogue with this work, The Story of Milk and Honey (2011) weaves together a tale of a man’s failure to write a love story set in Beirut—essentially, to recreate a history that cannot be divided from that specific history. On a wall, nestled within various photographs of plants and family portraits, a screen plays a video narrated by the man, who tells of how he found these photographs, and the difficulty of writing a story “devoid of political context.” Lacking such a context itself, the installation alludes to wavering attempts at defining “national identity,” a term that appears in the video. At this point, what is not being told or written forms a new subject position.

The newly commissioned A Philistine (2018) takes the form of an open reading area, complete with four comfy chairs in which visitors may read a text recalling a theater script, written in both English and vernacular Arabic. The story follows the journey of Loza, a woman who proceeds toward the past from the future, discovering borders and their counterpoints, and simultaneously examining episodes of specific histories that become entangled with waves of human emotions as the plot progresses. Anchored by photographs taken from and on a train throughout the former Yugoslavia, the mise-en-scène initially appears uncannily artificial, albeit innocuously so. After spending time reading the novel inside the installation, however, one finds that
it transitions into a relational aesthetic structure signifying the act of moving while embodying a sense of space-holding.