Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif weaves together French, English, and Arabic in her trilingual book and installation a Philistine, 2019–23. Handwritten on craft paper and string-bound with black thread, al-Sharif’s rhythmic visual narrative follows her young protagonist, Andaleeb, as she travels from France to Lebanon, through Palestine to Egypt for her father’s funeral. The book is in three languages, with English and French on the right-hand pages, under the English title, translated into French as Les Barbares, while the vernacular word Nawar titles the Arabic text on the left. Al-Sharif remembers, as a child, hearing the term pejoratively employed to describe nomadic peoples in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria—as in, “Don’t be like the Nawars.” “They’re barefoot and loud,” al-Sharif implicitly understood, as she recalled in an artist’s talk following the opening of the show, “doing precisely the things I want to do.”
Adorned with golden bookmarks, several copies of al-Sharif’s book were arranged around the gallery among bouquets of pink blossoms in vases and low cushions arranged as seats. Invoking Orientalist fantasies while also creating an urban refuge, Al-Sharif turned the storefront space into a velvet-upholstered living room. (At a certain point this past spring, a customized fragrance by Parisian parfumeur Hervé Domar, inspired by al-Sharif’s last exhibition at the gallery, had to fight to overcome the pungent odor of trash heaps outside. Protesting French President Macron’s proposed changes to the retirement age, trash collectors’ strikes left the city awash in waste.) On the walls, six color photographs, showing the blackened windows of a city bus, a wall of pay phones, and vacant municipal interiors, imagined the sites of Andaleeb’s wanderings through the Middle East.
Downstairs, al-Sharif’s installation of a two-channel video and inkjet-printed banners, Capital, 2022, opened with mirrored scenes of high-rise towers against backgrounds of desert and television. Nino Ferrer’s ballad “Le Sud” (1975), in which he sings of sunshine and immortality, captures the haze of nostalgia and desire and provides the perfect soundtrack for this film. Dressed in satin the color of rich soil, her face masked in heavy makeup, al-Sharif’s protagonist, played by Italian actress Francesca Tasini, is as polished and still as the suburban mansions that scroll past on the facing screen of the installation. Likewise, Assicurazioni Generali’s red-line logo that runs atop Zaha Hadid’s interminable tower in Milan, home to the global insurer, echoes the actor’s red lips, which rest in an exhausted frown. When she reaches her manicured hand to answer a white turn-dial phone, she hears a promoter pitching a new housing complex. “For the whole family, sicurezza!” (security!) She comes alive, aroused as he repeats: “Green avenues, golden yard, roses.” “Ancora!” (More!) she demands, flinging herself over an armchair and comically caressing herself with her phone. Her excitement in this piece resonates with Andaleeb’s euphoric release at the end of her journey in a Philistine’s closing pages.
In its final scenes, Capital dissolves into laughter. Tasini’s is rich and a bit crazed. A ventriloquist with a sock puppet appears. He wants to make a joke about fascism. “I don’t know if I should make it in Italian, in German, or in English,” he says. Al-Sharif closes her video with somnolence. The actor and his sock puppet go limp from fatigue and the black-and-white static of a box television set overtakes the image. A self-described nomad, al-Sharif currently lives in Berlin but is teaching this year in Tourcoing, France, where she’s working on a Philistine’s next chapter. Though intimidated by literature, she says, she harnesses its power to overturn the fictions we carry.
— Lillian Davies