Basma al-Sharif

The Place Where I was Condemned to Live is Basma al-Sharif’s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Basma’s work traverses many themes related to de Appel’s current focus: her films and installation pieces raise questions related to the representation of domesticity, land, and displacement.

Three installations and a film are presented Trompe l’œil (2016), a mise en scene, archival photographs and a looping video questions who has the right to make and reproduce images; A Philistine (2019-2023), a work centered around a fictional story written by al-Sharif follows a train journey moving backwards in time through history. The story undoes geographical borders and incites new possibilities for Palestinian futures and desires; CAPITAL (2023), a short film and photographic series, satirically explores how urban development and censorship are intertwined and driving a rise in Fascism in Egypt. Basma’s film Ouroboros (2017) will be screened at the end of each day of the exhibition. Ouroboros is a feature length film, that opens on an endless cycle of destruction and rebuilding in Gaza. Alternating between an eerie panoptic gaze and sumptuous 16mm footage, the film voyages through 5 different landscapes as an homage to the besieged territory in order to hope beyond hopelessness. Chinook, an Indigenous language spoken by artist-filmmaker Sky Hopinka in the film, subtly collapses the two peoples and their struggle for liberation into one another poetically.

As part of the opening, al-Sharif shared research from her new work Morning Circle through a symposium and workshop that looked critically at the ways in which Western cultural hegemony fails to see immigrants as integral to their populations, by taking one of the most vulnerable spaces: the Kindergarten, as a space of potential reform.