Basma Alsharif

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.

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An installation that takes over the space of the exhibition to re-establish it as a room in which all the elements that comprise the mise-en-scene are careful disruptions of a scene.

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for the installation: Renée’s Room

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Deep in the woods of New Hampshire, apathy and violence are blurred. A horror nature film develops, as Basma Alsharif fuses images from Ruggero Deodato’s “timeless slice of visceral horror,” Cannibal Holocaust, a self-referential study of sorts of the representation of violence, with those of another horror, equally distant, yet all too close.

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Bombers flying over Palestine, PFLP soldiers, civilians taking cover in shelters; through footage from a 1974 film by Kassem Hawal, the oppressed confront their occupiers.

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A transfixing performance film in which artist Basma Alsharif shoots footage in Athens, Malta and the "post-civilization" of the Gaza Strip while under self-hypnosis.

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High Noon is the meeting between the Southern Californian landscape with that of the South-Eastern landscape of Onomichi Japan as an experience of the gravitational pull towards the center of the earth, with the knowledge that we are sometimes standing on the world upside down. We briefly glimpse each landscape as a dizzying series of loops that seem to repeat themselves endlessly.

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a 3 minute camera edit blends the slow motion image of a woman walking into a river over the course of an hour.

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A woman recounts her story of the mass exodus of Palestinians from Jerusalem, beginning with the arrival and ending with the departure. The tale moves backwards in time and through various landscapes but the events are not being undone and the story has not been untold. Farther Than The Eye Can See is the tracing of a decaying experience told through words of a place that no longer exists.

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An attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic human rights: the Gaza Strip as a microcosm for the failure of civilization.

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A slideshow of abandoned spaces carries along the story of two girls who mysteriously turn up on the shores of a pre-apocalyptic paradise. Factual texts drawn from the Madrid Peace Accords to the CIA World Factbook are weaved into a fictional narrative that unfolds the story of a massacre.

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The Story of Milk and Honey is a short experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text, detailing an unnamed individual’s failure to write a love story about the Levant, as if it were a classical Arabic song. Through voiceover narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a story of defeat transpires into a journey that explores how we collect and perceive information, understand facts, history, images, and sound and where the individual is to be found in the midst of the material.

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Super 8mm film transferred to digital video. Installation composed of footage from three separate sequences that interweave frame by frame. Shot in the interiors of empty homes in Amman, Jordan. Sound composed of recording of food ingredients for unspecified dishes looped repetitively over ambient noise from film transfer to digital video.

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Short film about the politics of measuring.

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