Rosalind Nashashibi studied painting at Sheffield Hallam University, graduating in 1995, before completing a Master of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art in 2000. She now lives and works in London. Her work in moving image, using 16 mm film, explores subconscious and inner responses to moments and events, often addressing the politics surrounding communal relations and notions of an expanded family. While her early films, such as Eyeballing(2005), employ stillness and the distant observer as methods to interrogate tropes of anthropological cinema and documentary, later works mediate on the relationships between members of communities, their sites of habitation and the artist’s own position relative to the unfolding situations, staged or otherwise. In Electrical Gaza (2015), footage of the everyday lives of Palestinians is edited with sounds of the artist’s own breath and animated sequences, conveying the charged atmosphere of the days before the Israeli bombardment of summer 2014, and in Vivian’s Garden (2017) she follows the daily routines of two artists living in self-imposed exile in Panajachel, Guatemala, in their own matriarchal compound, Elisabeth Wild (1922-2020) and her daughter, Vivian Suter (b. 1949). For Denim Sky (2018-2022), R. Nashashibi takes up influences from the I Ching, old master paintings, Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi novella The Shobies’ Story (1990), and the landscapes of Lithuania and Scotland. Across three parts, the film explores expanded notions of a nuclear family, non-linear narrative and time travel to test forms of communication within relationships including the artist’s own family and friends as protagonists.

R. Nashashibi’s paintings likewise absorb elements from a range of sources, including film, literature, art history and her own life, juxtaposing opposing states of legibility, such as the abstract and the figurative, to unveil inherent tensions through an intuitive and exploratory process. Drawn to the unease between the sentimental reception of historic paintings against the technical accomplishments of the artists that made them, R. Nashashibi revisits motifs to reconsider their role as signifiers of particular emotions. For Mrs Taboret (2021), she made her own version of Portrait of Camille Monet (c. 1872-1874) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), heightening the woman’s pathos and melancholy by exaggerating the rigidity of her composure. Other paintings, such as Verso (2020), use elements of a human body as a frame for other forms and symbols.

Since 2005 R. Nashashibi has collaborated with the artist Lucy Skaer (b. 1975) under the name Nashashibi/Skaer. Together they have produced films including Flash in the Metropolitan (2006), capturing various objects in the museum’s Near Eastern, African and Oceanic collections, and Why Are You Angry? (2017), which questions the fame of the paintings of girls and young women that Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) created in Tahiti.

In 2003 R. Nashashibi became the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize, and she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2017. She represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and was the 2020 Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London. Her work has been included in Manifesta 7 in 2008 in Trentino (Italy), Sharjah 10 in 2011 (United Arab Emirates) and Documenta 14 in 2017 in Kassel (Germany).