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.
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Results
2pm: Handicap Dh 90,000 1,800m; Winner: Majestic Thunder, Tadhg O’Shea (jockey), Satish Seemar (trainer).
2.30pm: Handicap Dh120,000 1,950m; Winner: Just A Penny, Sam Hitchcott, Doug Watson.
3pm: Handicap Dh105,000 1,600m; Winner: Native Appeal, Pat Dobbs, Doug Watson.
3.30pm: Jebel Ali Classic Conditions Dh300,000 1,400m; Winner: Thegreatcollection, Adrie de Vries, Doug Watson.
4pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,600m; Winner: Oktalgano, Xavier Ziani, Salem bin Ghadayer.
4.30pm: Conditions Dh250,000 1,400m; Winner: Madame Ellingtina, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar.
5pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,600m; Winner: Mystery Land, Fabrice Veron, Helal Al Alawi.
5.30pm: Handicap Dh85,000 1,000m; Winner: Shanaghai City, Jesus Rosales, Rashed Bouresly.
Family reunited
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was born and raised in Tehran and studied English literature before working as a translator in the relief effort for the Japanese International Co-operation Agency in 2003.
She moved to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies before moving to the World Health Organisation as a communications officer.
She came to the UK in 2007 after securing a scholarship at London Metropolitan University to study a master's in communication management and met her future husband through mutual friends a month later.
The couple were married in August 2009 in Winchester and their daughter was born in June 2014.
She was held in her native country a year later.
David Haye record
Total fights: 32
Wins: 28
Wins by KO: 26
Losses: 4
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The%20specs
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EEngine%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%202-litre%204-cylinder%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EPower%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E153hp%20at%206%2C000rpm%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ETorque%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E200Nm%20at%204%2C000rpm%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ETransmission%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E6-speed%20auto%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFuel%20consumption%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E6.3L%2F100km%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EPrice%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EDh106%2C900%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EOn%20sale%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Enow%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
THE SPECS
Touareg Highline
Engine: 3.0-litre, V6
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Power: 340hp
Torque: 450Nm
Price: Dh239,312
Squads
India: Kohli (c), Rahul, Shaw, Agarwal, Pujara, Rahane, Vihari, Pant (wk), Ashwin, Jadeja, Kuldeep, Shami, Umesh, Siraj, Thakur
West Indies: Holder (c), Ambris, Bishoo, Brathwaite, Chase, Dowrich (wk), Gabriel, Hamilton, Hetmyer, Hope, Lewis, Paul, Powell, Roach, Warrican, Joseph
Du Football Champions
The fourth season of du Football Champions was launched at Gitex on Wednesday alongside the Middle East’s first sports-tech scouting platform.“du Talents”, which enables aspiring footballers to upload their profiles and highlights reels and communicate directly with coaches, is designed to extend the reach of the programme, which has already attracted more than 21,500 players in its first three years.
French Touch
Carla Bruni
(Verve)
A cheaper choice
Vanuatu: $130,000
Why on earth pick Vanuatu? Easy. The South Pacific country has no income tax, wealth tax, capital gains or inheritance tax. And in 2015, when it was hit by Cyclone Pam, it signed an agreement with the EU that gave it some serious passport power.
Cost: A minimum investment of $130,000 for a family of up to four, plus $25,000 in fees.
Criteria: Applicants must have a minimum net worth of $250,000. The process take six to eight weeks, after which the investor must travel to Vanuatu or Hong Kong to take the oath of allegiance. Citizenship and passport are normally provided on the same day.
Benefits: No tax, no restrictions on dual citizenship, no requirement to visit or reside to retain a passport. Visa-free access to 129 countries.
WORLD RECORD FEES FOR GOALKEEPERS
1) Kepa Arrizabalaga, Athletic Bilbao to Chelsea (£72m)
2) Alisson, Roma to Liverpool (£67m)
3) Ederson, Benfica to Manchester City (£35m)
4) Gianluigi Buffon, Parma to Juventus (£33m)
5) Angelo Peruzzi, Inter Milan to Lazio (£15.7m
Wednesday's results
Finland 3-0 Armenia
Faroes Islands 1-0 Malta
Sweden 1-1 Spain
Gibraltar 2-3 Georgia
Romania 1-1 Norway
Greece 2-1 Bosnia and Herzegovina
Liechtenstein 0-5 Italy
Switzerland 2-0 Rep of Ireland
Israel 3-1 Latvia
BUNDESLIGA FIXTURES
(All games 4-3pm kick UAE time) Bayern Munich v Augsburg, Borussia Dortmund v Bayer Leverkusen, Hoffenheim v Hertha Berlin, Wolfsburg v Mainz , Eintracht Frankfurt v Freiburg, Union Berlin v RB Leipzig, Cologne v Schalke , Werder Bremen v Borussia Monchengladbach, Stuttgart v Arminia Bielefeld
Zayed Sustainability Prize
If you go…
Emirates launched a new daily service to Mexico City this week, flying via Barcelona from Dh3,995.
Emirati citizens are among 67 nationalities who do not require a visa to Mexico. Entry is granted on arrival for stays of up to 180 days.
The specs
Price, base / as tested Dh1,100,000 (est)
Engine 5.2-litre V10
Gearbox seven-speed dual clutch
Power 630bhp @ 8,000rpm
Torque 600Nm @ 6,500rpm
Fuel economy, combined 15.7L / 100km (est)
Emiratisation at work
Emiratisation was introduced in the UAE more than 10 years ago
It aims to boost the number of citizens in the workforce particularly in the private sector.
Growing the number of Emiratis in the workplace will help the UAE reduce dependence on overseas workers
The Cabinet in December last year, approved a national fund for Emirati jobseekers and guaranteed citizens working in the private sector a comparable pension
President Sheikh Khalifa has described Emiratisation as “a true measure for success”.
During the UAE’s 48th National Day, Sheikh Khalifa named education, entrepreneurship, Emiratisation and space travel among cornerstones of national development
More than 80 per cent of Emiratis work in the federal or local government as per 2017 statistics
The Emiratisation programme includes the creation of 20,000 new jobs for UAE citizens
UAE citizens will be given priority in managerial positions in the government sphere
The purpose is to raise the contribution of UAE nationals in the job market and create a diverse workforce of citizens
Britain's travel restrictions
- A negative test 2 days before flying
- Complete passenger locator form
- Book a post-arrival PCR test
- Double-vaccinated must self-isolate
- 11 countries on red list quarantine
Factfile on Garbine Muguruza:
Name: Garbine Muguruza (ESP)
World ranking: 15 (will rise to 5 on Monday)
Date of birth: October 8, 1993
Place of birth: Caracas, Venezuela
Place of residence: Geneva, Switzerland
Height: 6ft (1.82m)
Career singles titles: 4
Grand Slam titles: 2 (French Open 2016, Wimbledon 2017)
Career prize money: $13,928,719
Our family matters legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
Five hymns the crowds can join in
Papal Mass will begin at 10.30am at the Zayed Sports City Stadium on Tuesday
Some 17 hymns will be sung by a 120-strong UAE choir
Five hymns will be rehearsed with crowds on Tuesday morning before the Pope arrives at stadium
‘Christ be our Light’ as the entrance song
‘All that I am’ for the offertory or during the symbolic offering of gifts at the altar
‘Make me a Channel of your Peace’ and ‘Soul of my Saviour’ for the communion
‘Tell out my Soul’ as the final hymn after the blessings from the Pope
The choir will also sing the hymn ‘Legions of Heaven’ in Arabic as ‘Assakiroo Sama’
There are 15 Arabic speakers from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan in the choir that comprises residents from the Philippines, India, France, Italy, America, Netherlands, Armenia and Indonesia
The choir will be accompanied by a brass ensemble and an organ
They will practice for the first time at the stadium on the eve of the public mass on Monday evening
Film: Raid
Dir: Rajkumar Gupta
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Ileana D'cruz and Saurabh Shukla
Verdict: Three stars
Electoral College Victory
Trump has so far secured 295 Electoral College votes, according to the Associated Press, exceeding the 270 needed to win. Only Nevada and Arizona remain to be called, and both swing states are leaning Republican. Trump swept all five remaining swing states, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, sealing his path to victory and giving him a strong mandate.
Popular Vote Tally
The count is ongoing, but Trump currently leads with nearly 51 per cent of the popular vote to Harris’s 47.6 per cent. Trump has over 72.2 million votes, while Harris trails with approximately 67.4 million.
Scoreline
Arsenal 0 Manchester City 3
- Agüero 18'
- Kompany 58'
- Silva 65'
Scotland's team:
15-Sean Maitland, 14-Darcy Graham, 13-Nick Grigg, 12-Sam Johnson, 11-Byron McGuigan, 10-Finn Russell, 9-Ali Price, 8-Magnus Bradbury, 7-Hamish Watson, 6-Sam Skinner, 5-Grant Gilchrist, 4-Ben Toolis, 3-Willem Nel, 2-Stuart McInally (captain), 1-Allan Dell
Replacements: 16-Fraser Brown, 17-Gordon Reid, 18-Simon Berghan, 19-Jonny Gray, 20-Josh Strauss, 21-Greig Laidlaw, 22-Adam Hastings, 23-Chris Harris
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Director: Jon Watts
Stars: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon
Rating:*****
INDIA SQUAD
Virat Kohli (capt), Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan, KL Rahul, Vijay Shankar, MS Dhoni (wk), Kedar Jadhav, Dinesh Karthik, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jasprit Bumrah, Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Shami
The Energy Research Centre
Founded 50 years ago as a nuclear research institute, scientists at the centre believed nuclear would be the “solution for everything”.
Although they still do, they discovered in 1955 that the Netherlands had a lot of natural gas. “We still had the idea that, by 2000, it would all be nuclear,” said Harm Jeeninga, director of business and programme development at the centre.
"In the 1990s, we found out about global warming so we focused on energy savings and tackling the greenhouse gas effect.”
The energy centre’s research focuses on biomass, energy efficiency, the environment, wind and solar, as well as energy engineering and socio-economic research.
