Art review: Rosalind Nashashibi

Published on Monday 14 September 2009 19:02

ROSALIND NASHASHIBI **** ICA, LONDON

IT IS now six years since Rosalind Nashashibi, as a recent graduate of Glasgow School of Art's MFA programme, won the inaugural Becks Futures Prize. She was immediately distinguished as an artist-film-maker of note, for works such as The State of Things, flickery Super 8 footage of women at a Glasgow jumble sale set to music by 1920s Egyptian singer Umm Kulthoum, or of model aeroplane enthusiasts in the American Midwest.

In these films, the camera felt like a dispassionate observer, a candid unblinking eye. Nashashibi's style was widely described as "documentary" in nature. But as her work has developed in its range and its ambition, this description needs to be revised.

Nashashibi's current show at the ICA is the biggest show of her work to date and concentrates on the output of the last four years. What emerges is a picture of an artist whose work is much more deliberate than those first films suggest, and which in turn makes us see those earlier films in a new light.

A key work in this is Eyeballing, the earliest film in this show, which Nashashibi made during a residency in New York in 2005. She filmed police officers outside their station in Lower Manhattan's First Precinct (illegally, but using a different pretext every day). We see them coming and going, smoking, chewing gum, shooting the breeze. We notice how watchful they are, whether or not they are conscious of Nashashibi's camera, almost as if they are acting their parts in their own police drama.

This footage is interspersed with film of found faces in the city: two windows like eyes and a ripped awning which looks like a mouth; the arrangements of vents in a wall. These inanimate things stare out at us, contrasting with quick, sidelong glances of the ever-watchful cops. We are watching a film about watching, about what it is to be watched.

Nashashibi is interested in performance, how people in everyday life enact a series of rituals that affirm their place in society, how they interact with others. So the women at the jumble sale and the model makers were performing, just as much as the cops.

Her interest in performance is explored most explicitly in In Rehearsal, a new work, a series of photographs which is accompanied by a sound recording, detailing a rehearsal of a contemporary opera. The black-and-white photographs unfold the narrative, the director demonstrating movements, singers practising, learning their positions on a raked stage. With the recorded sound of the rehearsal room playing, it looks like a film in storyboard, with each moment frozen in a photograph: the unobserved asides; the captured expressions; and the moment when an actor becomes a character and the magic happens.

Upstairs, more space is given to two recent films. The Prisoner is shown simultaneously on two adjacent screens, the right running about six seconds behind the left. The film shows a young woman – referencing film-maker Chantal Akerman, referencing Proust – walking through the South Bank complex in London, the only soundtrack the clack of her high heels on concrete and the mounting drama of Rachmaninoff's The Isle of the Dead. It is the most obviously cinematic of Nashashibi's films to date, and perhaps the most accessible, as the sense of drama builds with a kick of Hitchcockian tension, and the audience is put in the position of the shadowy pursuer.

Jack Straw's Castle, a new commission for this exhibition, is the longest film in the exhibition, and one of Nashashibi's most ambitious yet. At first, we are immersed in the bucolic green of a wild London park in high summer, sunlight filtering through leaves and illuminating glades. Then, with an all but imperceptible change of mood, she starts to show us men moving furtively among the trees: this is a cruising haunt, and they are looking for more than a walk in the park. Often, Nashashibi's films work through the contrast and juxtaposition, of images, moods, ideas.

Here, she sets up the contrast using the most subtle of shifts of mood between pastoral idyll and gay cruising haunt, without ever claiming that they are opposites.

The second part of the film is a further contrast. Now it's night, and a film set is assembling in the same part of the park. In the full glare of floodlights, somehow brighter than the sun, scaffolds are erected, lights hoisted and fitted. All is efficient and businesslike. Though their business is entirely artificial, the crew are also completely natural, enacting their own rituals associated with the practical side of the glamorous world of movies.

Unlike The Prisoner, with its immediately engaging sense of drama, this piece is a slow burner. But Nashashibi is more interested in the rigour of ideas than in making easy work. The conceit here is that she is filming the film-makers, turning her own careful, unstinting gaze on her own medium.

&#149 Until 1 November