Commissions Programme: Rosalind Nashashibi : Edinburgh Art Festival

Overview

Part One: Where there is a joyous mood, there a comrade will appear to share a glass of wine

Part Two: The moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray.

Rosalind Nashashibi’s films fuse narrative techniques with observational footage, creating a procession of images in which staged scenes flow seamlessly into real life. Her new two-part film is shot in Lithuania, London and Edinburgh, and takes its starting point from a short story by the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, The Shobies’ Story, which follows a group of individuals coming together in preparation for an experiment in space travel using non-linear time.

Nashashibi consulted the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual, when she started shooting and has used its response to shape the film over the last 12 months. Featuring the artist and her children, as well as close friends which she considers extended family, Nashashibi’s film explores how we make our own communities, new modes of conviviality, and reflects how a group’s sense of commonality is dissolved when there is an absence of communal experience and adherence to linear time.

Her aim, which was a perennial interest of the late Le Guin, is as much to reflect on the non-nuclear family and how it blends into the community and to working life, as to explore the survival of love in a non-linear time.

Commissioned with Foksal Art Foundation, Vienna Secession, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and National Galleries of Scotland.
Supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.