Rosalind Nashashibi, THE STATES OF THINGS, 2000.

© Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

THE STATES OF THINGS 2000

Rosalind Nashashibi (1973 – )

Details

Dimension
DURATION 3.5 MIN
Media
BLACK AND WHITE 16MM REVERSAL FILM TRANSFERRED TO BETA SP
Accession number
P7951

Summary

Grainy, black and white 16mm footage depicts aged women and a few men, rifling through piles of clothes: bustling, folding, arranging. Like seagulls they pick over a ravaged sea of junk and jumble, of fabric and garments. Where are we? When was this footage taken? The film itself seems old and battered, like a vintage piece of fabric itself, the cuts bleaching into white light. The protagonists, who appear to be at some kind of market are unaffected by the presence of a filmmaker<&ndash>–<&ndash> they go about their business, never looking at the camera. A mournful, Egyptian love song is playing: Hali Fi Hawaha Agabrecorded by Um Kolsoum in the 1920s. The viewer is left to grope around and try to locate what they are watching. Led by the non-western music, we imagine that this could be early documentary footage of a souk, perhaps, during some inter-war period. Resting on this notion, however, we begin to lose footing. These look like British grandmothers, a girl is wearing pigtails and modern hairclips, a boy is in a contemporary school uniform. The time and the place of the film becomes slippery.

Rosalind Nashashibi’s The States of Things(2000) was part of the artist’s exhibition at the Beck’s Futures Prize, in 2003, of which Nashashibi was the winner. Nashashibi made the film, in fact, at a Glasgow Salvation Army jumble sale, and, although this fact is never made explicit, the slow dawning that we have made a wrong assumption about the footage is uncomfortable and critical, yet strangely magical. For a moment, though only in our imaginations, this group of individuals were different <&ndash>–<&ndash> part of an utterly different narrative than the one we would place them in had the footage been made and presented differently. As eloquent as this is, Nashashibi’s film also touches on boredom, however. The viewer is made aware of a feeling of disinterestedness in non-specific foreign or historical lands: a sense that one can’t understand what we are seeing, although we feel we should, that we should see its importance. This feeling of boredom is also, however, peppered with nostalgia, with exoticism, Orientalism, of the Other.

These associations, this experiential form of film viewing is ushered in by Nashashibi by way of manipulating the medium of film itself, with deceptively simple adjustments allowing the viewer to locate the footage’s origin elsewhere. As Amna Malik has commented: <&ldquo>“A souk seems more exotic because it is located in an imaginary realm that is distant as much in time as in space, but is essentially the same as a jumble sale.”<&redquo> Nashashibi’s artwork often presents a kind of idea that reality is a kind of fluid, mutable substance that, if only lit this way or that, or accompanied by this soundtrack, can become glamorous, fictional, dramatic or exotic, and here, in this short film, by minimal means, she manages to take a scene of Glasweigan pensioners and lift them, transporting the scene into another narrative, another film, another set of meanings, of different states.

Laura McLean-Ferris

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Documentary

    The term ‘Documentary’ was not coined until the 1920s, and then used by the British film-maker, John Grierson, to refer to moving pictures. It has a long and continuous history in British photography, reaching back to the invention of the medium. Many critics claimed that the documentary impulse, which can perhaps be best defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world, is inherent in the medium itself. It was this view which came to be known as the realist paradigm - the belief that a photograph represents a ‘slice of reality’ easily understood by the viewer. This belief governed understanding of photography from the moment of its invention in the era of positivism in the 19th Century, until it was itself subject to interrogation in the 1980s.

    Early British practitioners included John Thomson whose visual essay Street Life in London (1876) documented the life of the London poor, and Hill and Adamson who portrayed, in the mid 1840s, the customs and way of life of the fisher folk of Newhaven near Edinburgh. In the early 20th century, following the emergence of documentary film-making and Mass Observation (a study undertaken in the North of England by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson), this new aesthetic found its most persuasive outlet in the mass circulation weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life. In time, however, pressure from advertisers combined with the restrictions of group journalism and curtailed the independence of creative photographers, with only exceptional individuals such as Bill Brandt able to survive as both a photojournalist and an independent photographer. His images of Britain’s class-ridden society along with his more experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a profound influence on a younger generation and established Brant as a major creative force in the development of modernism in Britain.

    Mass Observation was designed to emulate the radical achievements of the worker-photography movement which had arisen in Germany during the 1920s. It proved influential on the evolution of British documentary, especially on those photographers associated with the Side Gallery in Newcastle. The gallery fostered a regional, community-oriented form of documentary practice. Its philosophy was rooted firmly in the notion that an authentic document can only be generated by those familiar with the local community. Photographers associated with Side Gallery included Sirkka Konttinen, Isabella Jedrecyck, Graham Smith, Peter Fryer, Chris Killip and Julian Germain.

    It was, however, across the Atlantic that the more enduring legacy concerning the ethics and status of documentary was to be found in the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of the American rural poor during the Depression. One of its outstanding photographers was Walker Evans whose use of signs and symbols (such as billboards and advertising hoardings) as images of desire created a text or narrative to accompany the careful sequencing of images. The direct inheritors of the photograph as social sign were the American photographers of the ‘social landscape’, namely Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whose unsympathetic vision of the American landscape reflected the anxieties of urban life during the booming consumer decade - store fronts, billboards, graffiti and advertising. They chose to portray people, situations and artefacts in a casual and objective way that allowed the viewer to interpret the work freely; a strategy that became known as the ‘snapshot aesthetic’. One of those who experienced many of these developments first hand was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. His work was widely reproduced in the 1960s and his book A Day Off (1974) proved a particular inspiration for the generation of documentary photographers who developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    Relevant websites:
    The work of early documentary photographs can be found in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society www.rps.org)
    The Mass Observation archive is held by the University of Sussex www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/
    The work of the Side Gallery can be seen at     www.amber-online.com/gallery/
    The archive for the Farm Security Administration is now in the Print and Reading Room Collections of the Library of Congress in Washington www.loc.gov/rr/print

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Medium

    Refers to either the material used to create a work of art, craft or design, i.e. oil, bronze, earthenware, silk; or the technique employed i.e. collage, etching, carving. In painting the medium refers to the binder for the pigment, e.g. oil, egg, acrylic dispersion. The plural form is media.