Love for the landscape under a veil of ignorance
Reflection on Basma al-Sharif's solo exhibition by Eli Witteman

Writer Eli Witteman reflects on the works of Basma al-Sharif in the solo exhibition The Place Where I was Condemned to Live at de Appel, on view from 27 June to 8 September 2024. You can find more information on the exhibition here.

The lyrics ‘Il ne manque rien’, (‘Nothing is lacking’) from Nino Ferrer’s Le Sud are heard in the background as the protagonist of CAPITAL dances in front of her television, situated in a living room without walls. Referring to its conservative predecessors, Basma al-Sharif's 19-minute white telephone film (telefoni bianchi) doesn’t propagate fascism: it rather mocks it.

‘I want to make a joke about fascism, but I don’t know if I should make it in Italian, in German, or in English’, an Italian-speaking man on television says, ventriloquizing with a puppet of a white bird on his hand. He calls the woman in the living room on her white telephone, and as she picks up, we see a modern residential area, upside down, from a worm’s eye view. ‘I hear that you are looking for a retreat from your busy life’, the man on the phone tells her, while naming different luxury villas in residential compounds that are to be the new capital of Cairo, ‘the New Administrative Capital’: a place completely devoid of cultural and architectural history. The man says: ‘You can rest assured that every single villa is identical’, illustrating fascism’s legacy: everybody’s desires should be the same.

In its mockery, the film shows an ongoing problem with the romanticisation of the South: rich people from the North flee to places with a rich history, in search of a calmer, easier and sunnier life, while through their movement, they are actually erasing these histories. ‘Time passes too slowly, […] so many miserable years’, and then: ‘Fuck the South, it was never really that good / Let’s move to the North, so we can live one million years, and leave the summer behind’. They were never interested in these histories to begin with: they wanted a sunny life, as long as the facade lasted.

In the time-travelling film Ouroboros, moving from dawn, through noon, through dusk, to night, and back, the cycle of death and regeneration is central. At the crack of dawn, we see a woman in Gaza walking backwards through her neighbourhood, her garden, between houses, and through the corridors and the rooms of her own house (or is it actually hers?). The screen reads: ‘We were cursed long before we knew to defend ourselves, and now we are sick with an illness that cannot be cured’. While the onscreen text in the film is read aloud in Chinook translation, I realise that I know this name firstly from the US Air Force planes, rather than the North American Indigenous people. I suddenly understand the connection between the images of Gaza and the Chinook language, as they are both subject to colonial violence.

And when noon arrives, we follow a man in a red sweater walking backwards, I assume this is the man that represents Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail: the man in the cycle of death and regeneration. We follow him as he wanders around, looking for places to ease his misery, although he starts to experience it over and over again. We see him in a room full of people, rehearsing what seems to be a play, and relocating their bodies in the room. He is looking for his place, but he doesn’t really find it.

At dusk, there’s the first real reference to the snake eating its own tail, as it is drawn in a sketchbook with church bells in the back. And although we should be on the dark side of twilight, the sun is bright enough to show us the drawings in detail, as if it’s midday. The man cooks backwards, he smokes at the breakfast table, he lies awake in bed.

In the night we see a young girl, a trampoline and a dog. The car is driving with the roof window open. We start moving backwards: from night to dusk, from dusk to noon, and from noon to dawn. The spectator can see that this is not just a romantic story about a man regenerating: we can see it’s a film about war, about destruction, and colonial terror. Through the interchanging warmth of the 16mm fragments and the archival footage of the destruction of Gaza, the dream turns out to be quite the nightmare. We are not looking at the sublime—we are looking at people, buildings and scenes destroyed by territorial occupation. These are images we now see daily on the news, while in 2017, when this film was made, footage of the violence already existed.

The film plays with our desire to see (what we) love, the beauty of human connection and the love for the landscape—but while we are sucked into the screen, it shows us the things we try to mask with romance: it shows us the dry, rough, and bleak reality.

In the video work Trompe l’Oeil, several domestic scenes are interchanged with fragments in which the protagonist draws boxes around photographs taken from the Lawrence of Arabia collection of the Library of Congress. The domestic scenes are always filmed from the protagonist’s point of view; we see their feet walking on the apartment floor, their hands cutting an onion, scrambling an egg, putting on a record, but there are two sceneries in which we see the protagonist from another point of view: while replicating the photographs of Lawrence of Arabia, and the scenes where the protagonist sits on the toilet seat.

In the background we hear a crying baby, scraping and pencil on paper: domestic sounds that are not soothing, but they break your streams of thought. In the same staccato rhythm as the video fragments, the domesticity doesn’t ever get comfortable, and the observer is left in an uncanny valley.

Through her romantic imagery, Basma al-Sharif shows us scenes we long to be a part of. At the same time, she confronts us with the naivety of our romanticism by combining it with the rougher images of destroyed buildings, and references to fascism and colonial violence. By doing this, she shows us that a romantic life is often a life covered under a veil of ignorance.