Rosalind Nashashibi was born to a Palestinian father and Irish mother in Croydon, London, England in 1973 and received her higher education in the arts in the UK. Nashashibi is an established filmmaker who often explores communities and contentious historical moments via an associative rather than a prescriptive approach.
Contemporary filmmaker and painter, Layla Rosalind Nashashibi was born to a Palestinian father and Irish mother in Croydon, London, England in 1973. She obtained her BA in Fine Art in 1995 from Sheffield Hallam University. Nashashibi continued her education with a Master of Fine Arts from Glasgow School of Art in 2000, which also included a three-month exchange at CalArts, California.
Nashashibi’s oeuvre includes filmmaking, painting and photography. Guided by empathy and a personal touch, her practice focuses on capturing intimate slices of modern life. By portraying a range of relationships, her work examines the subtle details of her subjects’ lives and environments. Her films exhibit non-linear storytelling, explore power dynamics and historical contexts. Moreover, her films and paintings often intertwine, with each piece feeding into the next and fostering a continuous interplay. Nashashibi’s films and paintings combine a gentleness and softness, stemming from her intuitive and process-oriented methodology. Echoing her films, her paintings invite viewers to explore associations, moving away from a structured experience to a more interpretative one. Since 2014, she has embraced both abstraction and figuration, while blending vibrant colours and organic forms in her painting. Her work also subtly nods to other artists and filmmakers, including David Hockney, Pierre Bonnard, Alexander Kluge, and Chantal Akerman, weaving their influences into her work. While her paintings share traits with German Expressionism, they stand apart in their reserved nature.
These principles of her practice can be exemplified by several films: The State of Things (2000) in black and white, captures scenes of elderly women at a Salvation Army sale in Glasgow, set to the soundtrack of a love song by Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Despite its Glasgow setting, the film's grainy appearance often leads viewers to mistakenly place the women in a non-British historical context. The 2002 film Dahiet a Bareed, District of the Post Office was shot in the West Bank in Israel, in an area where Nashashibi's grandfather worked. It depicts everyday scenes, such as football games and hair grooming, while her 2006 film Abbeys offered a set of four black and white photographs, each showcasing an inverted view of an archway. These different perspectives reveal human-like faces, derived from images in an old photograph album. In 2009, a retrospective of her work was shown at the ICA, London. Nashashibi’s films Electrical Gaza (2015, commissioned by the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum) and Vivien’s Garden (2017) were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017. In the earlier film, Nashashibi mixed animated sequences with footage from the Gaza Strip showing a fixer, drivers, and a translator, her depiction casting Gaza in an almost enchanting light: an atemporal impenetrable space which is nonetheless imbued with an intense energy. Nashashibi's lens captured the tranquil yet deceptive lull in Gaza just before the outbreak of heavy bombardment by Israel in the summer of 2014. This film was realised on a 35mm film positive, crafted from a high-definition file. Vivian's Garden, explored the lives of mother Vivian Suter and daughter Elisabeth Wild, both artists living in Guatemala.
Nashashibi also often works with artist Lucy Skaer as Nashashibi/Skaer, a partnership formed in Glasgow in 2005. Their first collaborative film in the same year, The Ambassador focused on the British Consul General in Hong Kong, presented as a two-screen video. While the duo maintain their individual practices, they often collaborate on 16mm films that explore the themes of women and world cultures. Nashashibi/Skaer presented an exhibition, Nashashibi/Skaer: Why Are You Angry? at Tate St Ives in 2017, in which their eponymous film premiered alongside a selection of other collaborative 16mm works. The new film was inspired by a Paul Gauguin painting, critically examining his portrayal of Tahitian women, while juxtaposing staged and candid scenes of their daily lives.
Nashashibi is represented by GRIMM gallery, exhibits regularly in the UK and internationally, and has been the recipient of several awards. In 2003, she became the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize for the The State of Things . Three years later, she received the Decibel award. She was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize in 2013. The following year, she was honoured with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. In 2019, Nashashibi was named artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, London. This year-long residency involved working in the Gallery's studio, accessing collections and research, culminating in an exhibition and publication. In 2022, she was appointed as a Tate artist trustee by the prime minister, serving a four-year term. Rosalind Nashashibi lives and works in London. Her works are held in several public collections in the UK, including the Arts Council Collection, British Council Collection, Imperial War Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, Southampton City Art Gallery, and Tate.