Rosalind Nashashibi. Carlo’s Vision, (Body Habits)
Curated by Cecilia Canziani and Ilaria Gianni
September 21st - November 18th, 2011
Opening: Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 from 6.30pm
Nomas Foundation, viale Somalia 33, Rome
Tuesday, 20 September Nomas Foundation presents Carlo's Vision, (Body habits), the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy by Rosalind Nashashibi, developed in collaboration with Peep-Hole, Milan.
The exhibition takes the form of a dyptich divided in two venues subtitled respectively Body Habits and Sacred and Profane.
Common element and leading thread of the two exhibitions is the new film Carlo's Vision commissioned by Nomas Foudation and Peep-Hole and produced by the Stefano and Raffaella Sciarretta Collection. Each location will present one other work relating to the film.
Carlo’s Vision (2011) is a 16mm film based on an episode in the unfinished novel Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Petrolio gives us a picture of the Italian contemporary world, a crucial contribution to the understanding of what happened in Italy between the Sixties and the Seventies. The artist moves from the vision of the main character, Carlo. Nashashibi’s intention is not to make the vision as Pasolini described it into a film but rather to shift the vision in today's context and let it clash with reality. The structure, the main characters and props will be taken from the novel, but the rest will be left to reality and observation. Petrolio was set at the end of the sixties, Nashashibi’s film sets the vision on Via di Tor Pignattara this summer. Carlo perceives reality in a different intensity of time, light and colour to that experienced by the rest of the street. Nashashibi’s film takes a ritual and a vision from outside of time, and drops it into the most ordinary part of the day, creating a friction where the simultaneous realities rub against one another.
At Peep-Hole (from September 15th to November 6th, 2011, curated by Vincenzo de Bellis and Bruna Roccasalva) Nashashibi presents Shelter for a New Youth (2011) a mixed-media installation in which the artist first showed her interest in Petrolio. The work was completed earlier this year for Sharjah Biennial and it comprises photographs of male crotches and painted panels showing the hands of Mickey Mouse as the hands of Buddha. One hand is pointed upwards and the other downwards, in a gesture that suggests openness and acceptance and also ambivalence.
At Nomas Foudation, Rosalind Nashashibi also presents a collection of images and reproductions titled Agents and Onlookers: photographs expressly made for the show, personal shots and others taken by friends, along with pages torn from books. The association of these images constitute a constellation of thoughts, displayed for the first time by the artist and subtletly related to Carlo’s Vision.
On Friday, September 23rd at 7.00pm a screening of the artist’s recent films followed by a talk between the artist and the curators of the project will take place at MACRO.
The research of Rosalind Nashashibi (1973) is focused on the aesthetic of everyday life in urban environments. The artist moves away from representation to privilege experience as the locus of consciousness. Often two elements are juxtaposed in order to make visible different layers of reality that co-exist in one moment, or a constructed scene, a fiction is set into a real situation. She mainly works with cinema where the melancholic drift of time passing place the viewer in a position of experiencing the present.
Her most recent solo shows include those at Tulips and Roses, Brussels (2010); ICA, London (2009); Bergen Kunstalle, Bergen (2009); Kustlerhaus, Stuttgart (2009); Presentation House, Vancouver (2008); Professional Gallery, OCAD, Toronto (2008); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2007); Art Basel Statements with Harris Lieberman (New York), Basel (2007); Kunsthalle, Basel (2004); Tate Britain, London (2004).
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as: Time Again Sculpture Center, New York, US (2011); The Art of Narration Changes with Time Galerie Sprueth Magers, Berlin, Germany (2011); Erre (Variations labyrinthiques) Pompidou Metz, France 2011 – 2012; Repetition Island, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Into the belly of a Dove, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City 2010, Berlin (2010); Sculpture of the Space Age, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009); Displaced, UCLA, Los Angeles (2003). She also participated at Sharjah Biennial X, Sharjah 2011, Manifesta 7, Trento (2008) 52nd and 50th International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale, Venice (2007, 2003), The 5h and the 7th Momentum Nordic Biennials, 2007 and, and 5th Berlin Biennial, Berlin 2008 (with Lucy Skaer).