Basma al Sharif's poetic narratives avoid politics but they evoke a longing for the memory of a place that no longer exists, writes Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. On a Friday afternoon in the early summer of 2006, seven members of a single Palestinian family were killed in an explosion on a sandy, shrub-strewn beach in Gaza. In the days and weeks that followed, video footage of the aftermath circulated furiously around the world. What it showed was a 10-year-old girl runing across the beach and slamming herself to the ground beside the dead body of her father. She rises, slaps the tears from her face and wails the word "abouna" - "our father" - over and over.
The young girl, named Huda Ghalia, lost her father, stepmother and five siblings in one go. Israeli forces admitted to bombing the beach by land and sea that day, but a military investigation cleared them of all culpability, insisting the deadly explosion was caused by an old shell buried in the sand or a landmine planted by Hamas. Local and regional news channels aired the images of Ghalia liberally. International broadcasters ran with the story, and the footage turned up on YouTube, where it has since been viewed some 300,000 times. But the beach attack came at the beginning of a brutal season in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. By the time the summer of 2006 came to an end, thousands of people were dead and a million displaced. Ghalia's tragedy sifted to the bottom of a catastrophic pile, replaced by one disaster after another and forgotten.
The artist Basma al Sharif, however, remembered the story well when she discovered the footage of Ghalia in the archives of the independent news agency Ramattan. Sharif, who is 26, was born in Kuwait, raised in France and educated in the United States. She studied fine art in Chicago, lived for a time in Cairo and moved to Beirut almost a year ago. But half of her family is from Gaza, and so the story of the girl on the beach, a phrase Sharif uses often when discussing her art, must have hit awfully close to home. Variations on Ghalia's tragedy have slipped into the intricate layers of her work three times in three years.
Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins, from 2006, is a series of 12 subtitled photographs. The images appear arbitrary and banal: a cow, a seaside cafe, a sceptical journalist, an orientalist painting, a military tank, a pair of knees, a flyswatter above sandalled feet. But they are overlaid with fragments of text that piece together a narrative about two sisters going for a walk on a beach "on the hottest of days in the dead of summer".
Scanning from one photograph to next, we read the following lines: "the remains of our/lives are modest we fell to the ground and the shells stuck/to our cheeks my sister said remember those things/we cannot forget and I said yes /their imprints on our faces we stood to walk/the ground opened up to swallow us whole." It is as if Sharif were transcribing the language of the attack while imagining the memories of summer that Ghalia and her sisters should have shared.
In the 12-minute video Everywhere Was the Same, from 2007, Sharif tells another story about two girls who turn up on the shores of a city. After their arrival, the piece, which features a slideshow of abandoned spaces, takes a darker turn, delving into an account of a massacre, the details of which are never disclosed. We Began by Measuring Distance, a 19-minute video from 2009, is Sharif's most ambitious work to date, weaving together several different strands of text, image and sound. The footage of Huda Ghalia on the beach in Gaza is present in the video's opening scene, but the catch is that Sharif uses only the sound: the metallic thud of a bomb, an ambulance's piercing siren, and then, unmistakably, Ghalia's stabbing cries. Gone are the highly charged images of a little girl beating herself up next to her father's corpse. In their place are placid shots of clouds passing across a blazing sun, over a tangled cityscape on the sea, below another sun that has been darkened to the likeness of the moon. Like a warning, Ghalia's voice sets the tone. But she is nowhere to be seen. She is present but absent at once.
After the opening scenes, We Began by Measuring Distance follows a loose, aerated narrative about an unidentified "we". Two sisters, two lovers, a group of friends - as viewers we are never sure. But a man with an incredibly deep voice speaks in Arabic about their circumstances and behaviours. "On a day as any other day," he begins, "all of our memories would become significant only in retrospect." The narrator describes how they pass the time and stave off boredom by reading a book memorialising their homeland, which leads them to conclude: "Our homeland truly is a history that is no longer within reach."
Then, in the face of sadness and melancholy, they invent a game of measurements. The measurements start out as arbitrary - a circle, a triangle, the conversion of feet to centimetres - but become more geographically specific (the distances between various cities) and politically charged (key dates in the calendar of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) as the video progresses. The images on screen jump from a frozen lake to a green meadow scattered with trees. The storyline breaks for a recitation on old-growth forests. We see images of strange creatures and plants in an aquarium and hear the woozy, instrumental bridge of an old Abdel Halim Hafez song entitled The Fortune Teller. At the end, we see footage of two women that has been slowed down to an absurdly lethargic pace. They approach the camera, evidently aggrieved. But their movements are so exaggerated we cannot tell if they are laughing or crying. Behind them in the darkness, we can just make out stretches of sand and sea.
Sharif is not alone among artists grappling with the Palestinian condition and deconstructing the means by which it has been represented along the way. Nor is she alone among artists mining archival material for artworks engaging notions of memory and history. But she does belong to a small and select group making work in and around a region called the Middle East who are comfortable casting aside the most obvious markers of identity politics that have made contemporary Middle Eastern art such a hot commodity in the international market.
Like the Egyptian artists Iman Issa and Hassan Khan or the Cypriot Haris Epaminonda, Sharif has created a distinctive visual language with its own internal system for generating meaning. Her videos and photographs do not ply viewers with information about the region's conflicts and troubles, nor do they make direct reference to newsworthy issues or events. Instead, they hinge on codes, forms and gestures that only begin to make sense in relation to one other. After the so-called documentary turn in contemporary art, Sharif's work points in a direction that leads past the cold and the clinical, where notions as démodé as beauty and imagination can reclaim their critical potential.
Sharif composes her videos and photographs from material crammed onto the hard drive of her computer. Much of it deals with Palestine, but just as much of it has nothing to do with Palestine at all. She has collected Arabic love songs; articles about Italian cinema, fascism, political amnesia and collective memory; photographs of cities around Jordan; samples of ambient noise recorded in Beirut; texts excerpted from books about forests and drawings copied from books about wildflowers.
"I have this habit," says Sharif, "of constantly gathering and shooting material, of deciding what to do with it until later, of not having any idea and then suddenly producing something from it." Sharif takes in a great deal of political context - just as a work like We Began by Measuring Distance is somehow "about" Huda Ghalia, most of her work is somehow "about" the situation in Palestine. But she also evacuates politics altogether from her work, hollowing out the specificity of her material and filling it in poetic narratives and suggestive mysteries. Spending time with her photographs and videos, one learns very little about Palestine in terms of facts, figures, constructed histories, lopsided representations or even polemical assertions.
What comes across instead is the slow creep of subjective, sentient experience. Sharif's work has the effect of making longing, nostalgia and melancholy palpably felt, without ever giving viewers the clues to what has been lost. Of course what has been lost is Palestine, but Sharif seems to be digging for something deeper, beneath nationalism and patriotism, toward a core answer to the question of what it means - or how it feels - to be tied to a place, a narrative, an idea that does not exist.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer for The Review in Beirut.