Basma al-Sharif
I want all this material burned

From September 6 to October 26, 2024
The gallery will open its doors for the opening on September 6 at 5 pm

This first solo exhibition in Montreal by Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif brings together three short films — Capital, A Field Guide to the Ferns, and O, Persecuted — and the feature-length Ouroboros. Blurring the boundaries between domestic space and the political arena, the artist examines the fragility of our personal environments and their impermanence — regardless of how unyielding and imposing our built environments and institutional structures might appear. In al-Sharif's work, the word border multiplies in meaning, delineating physically and geographically but also across landscapes of affect. Exploring narratives where official history and politics infiltrate personal lives, the artist questions the validity of images and representation, whether they too are construed by imposed ideologies.

The short film program runs from noon to 3:30 p.m., followed by the feature film Ouroboros at 3:30 pm

Capital (2023)

This satirical short film explores the correlation between urban development, censorship, and fascism. A woman in her salon picks up the telephone and is greeted by a sultry condo salesman. The scene references the Italian Telefoni Bianchi films of the 1930s and 1940s, which were both a precursor to Mussolini-era propaganda cinema and a way to seduce the public out of social critique and to maintain consumerist apathy. This mise-en-scène is layered with documentation of planned cities and luxury housing developments in Egypt and Italy — two places with distant and recent geopolitics of fascism and where facades of wealth are erected on top of histories of violent negligence. A ventriloquist uses a puppet to speak his dissent, a voice otherwise censored by authoritarian regimes.  

A Field Guide to the Ferns (2015)

Images from Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 horror film Cannibal Holocaust are revived and embedded into eerie scenes shot deep in the New Hampshire woods. Deodato’s controversial film, which was thought by many to feature footage of real events ultimately centers on the confused status of violent images, as does many of al-Sharif’s works. Drawing parallels with media images of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza from 2014, and juxtaposing such images to the leisurely 1956 publication A Field Guide to Ferns, the artist ambiguates divisions between violence and apathy.

O, Persecuted (2014)

The artist works to restore and resuscitate Kassem Hawal’s 1974 film Our Small Houses, one of the few surviving revolutionary works made by Hawal, a filmmaking group founded under the Central Information of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). These images surface from the past, commemorated by the body and its gestures, before abruptly dissolving into clashing scenes of escapism, as though deleting time, place, and ideology. 

Ouroboros (2017)

Opening on an aerial view of Gaza, in states of both ruin and reconstruction, this first feature-length film by al-Sharif traverses five different landscapes to contemplate loss and forgetting, to seek hope in hopelessness. Moving backward — or back to a beginning that is also an end — becomes a way forward, to shift and build through and for community. Narrated by filmmaker Sky Hopinka in Chinook, a revived Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, the film brings together the struggle for liberation and sovereignty of the Indigenous and Palestinian peoples. Extending out of this question of territorial occupation, the work asks how place itself occupies, how we inhabit it and how it inhabits us. 

Basma al-Sharif (b. 1983) is a Palestinian artist who has developed her practice between the Middle East, Europe, and North America. She is currently based in Berlin. Working in cinema and installation, al-Sharif examines recurring political conflicts, confronting the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

al-Sharif holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago (2007). She was a resident of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Italy) and the Pavillon Neuflize OBC of the Palais de Tokyo (France). In 2009, she received a Jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial, a grant from the Fundación Botín in 2010 and Mophradat’s Consortium Commissions in 2018, and was a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme in 2022-2023. Basma al-Sharif’s work has been presented in many international exhibitions including Manifesta 8 (Spain), the Whitney Biennial (USA), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India). Her films have been screened at film festivals in Locarno (Switzerland), Berlin (Germany), Mar del Plata (Argentina), Milan (Italy), London (UK), Toronto and Montreal (Canada), New York (USA), and Yamagata (Japan), amongst others. She has had solo exhibitions at the CCA Glasgow, the MOCA Toronto, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most recent exhibition, The Place Where I was Condemned to Live is on view at De Appel in the Netherlands for the summer of 2024.