In an age when digital technology is taking over the film industry and analogue film is slowly but surely becoming a thing of the past, one can trust always artists to still make extensive use of celluloid film. Rosalind Nashabishi is a video artist who works almost exclusively with 16mm film, yet rather than it be a simple artistic preference over digital film, she uses the technology to define her work in such a way that makes it part of the work itself.
At her current exhibition at the ICA, she presents several films which demonstrate a range of ideas that she explores in her work: in 'Eyeballin'', she anthropomorphises everyday objects around us showing the emotions they can have, juxtaposing them with images of the robotic and uniform New York City cops; in 'Jack Straw's Castle', a film commissioned especially by the ICA, she shows mixes the real and the theatrical by showing scenes of Hampstead Heath both in the day, capturing the natural environment around her, and at night, in which we see a film crew lighting a scene, producing a dream-like cinematic world.
Her most interesting piece is 'The Prisoner', a film indirectly inspired by Proust's homonymous fifth volume of his work 'In Search of Lost Time'. In the film, we follow a woman as she walks around the South Bank, accompanied by the suspenseful sounds of Rachmaninoff. Yet Nashabishi sets up two projectors side by side with the footage passing through one camera first and then the second, producing a 6-second time delay. The effect is not of mirroring or a feeling of repetition but rather creates a sense of unease; it seems as if the one woman is being followed by another. In a brilliantly simple Hitchcockian narrative, Nashabishi manages to produce a tense drama in which the viewer is omniscient but the character is entirely oblivious.
Perhaps it is this narrative quality that set 'The Prisoner' apart from her other films at the exhibition. This creation and manipulation of narrative from the simplest fragments of film desconstructs it and pushes storytelling to its boundaries, making us question what our conception of a story is: whether it needs a beginning, middle and end, or whether it can be even simpler than that, like 'The Prisoner' demonstrates.
The exhibition will run until the 1st November and is free.
http://www.ica.org.uk/Rosalind%20Nashashibi+21364.twl
