Turner Prize-nominated artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s moving image work The State of Things was screened online for a limited two-week run.
CABLE CLUB is a series of artist films from the British Council Collection. Starting in June 2020, every month a new artist film, rarely seen online, will be posted on our website ready for audiences to enjoy around the world.
Rosalind Nashashibi's The State of Things, 2000 was available to watch online from Tuesday 23 June 2020 - Tuesday 7 July 2020.
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The State of Things is also part of WE ARE HERE: Artists' Moving Image from the British Council Collection and LUX. WE ARE HERE is a programme of artists’ film, curated by Tendai John Mutambu, that has been seen in cities around the world – including Shymkent, Kazakhstan; Jakarta, Indonesia and São Paulo, Brazil.
Now in its second year, in response to the global Covid-19 crisis, we are pleased to offer partners the opportunity to take part in WE ARE HERE by sharing the best of contemporary moving image with audiences through online screening events. Interested? Find out more here and get in contact via visual.arts@britishcouncil.org.
Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based artist working in film and painting and a Lecturer of Fine Art. She kindly agreed to show The State of Things on our website for a limited run.
The State of Things, a film created early in her career, depicts footage of women and a few men rifling through piles of clothes: bustling and re-arranging garments at a market and ignoring the camera’s presence.
The black and white film itself is grainy and seems aged. A mournful Egyptian love song – “Hali Fi Hawaha Agab” – recorded by Um Kolsoum in the 1920s plays in the background. The setting of Nashashibi’s film is unclear, leaving the viewer to search for hints of time and place.
The fact Nashashibi shot the film at a charity jumble sale in Glasgow, Scotland, is undisclosed throughout and, once realised, challenges simplistic theories of East and West.
CABLE CLUB will run from June 2020. It’s named CABLE CLUB to nod to the undersea internet cables that power the majority of our modern internet traffic and fuel the online display of these moving image works.
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Fancy more moving image? Check out our Film team’s series of blogs highlighting films freely available from their archive. Their latest post: IN FOCUS: NATURAL BEAUTY TO SEE YOU THROUGH QUARANTINE
You can also find out more about the British Council Collection here.
