Rosalind Nashashibi is National Gallery’s First Artist in Residence

Filmmaker and painter Rosalind Nashashibi, whose work merges everyday observations with mythology, will be the National Gallery’s first artist in residence. The artist will be the London gallery’s inaugural participant in a new residency programme that will replace an associate artist scheme launched in 1989 which gave artists access to the gallery’s collection. 

Nashashibi will work on site in the gallery’s studio, in close ‘proximity to the gallery’s collection, research and teams.’ The residency forms part of the gallery’s Modern and contemporary art programme and Nashashibi’s residency will result in a publication and display in the summer of 2020. 

Born in 1973 in Croydon, London, Nashashibi has shown work at the Imperial War Museum, Documenta 14 and Baltic Triennial. She is also a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London. Her 2015 work Electrical Gaza used animated sequences of domestic life in Gaza to explore themes of community, family and friendship. In 2017, she was nominated for the Turner Prize and also represented Scotland at the 2007 Venice Biennale.  As Jennifer Higgie wrote in a 2005 frieze feature: ‘Her palette comprises the patterns and rhythms of the everyday, the non-event or the seemingly inconsequential [...] Her films are as self-absorbed as the people and places they explore; Nashashibi likes to train her camera on people so involved in the moment that they seem indifferent to her presence.’

Writing for frieze in 2008, Martin Herbert commented on the artist’s observations of everyday life, and her ‘fascination with how society is structured to the ethereal organization of an individual’s thought patterns.’ And don’t miss Brian Dillon’s review of her show London’s ICA in 2010: ‘Before Nashashibi’s semi-surreptitious gaze, watcher and watched, actor and prop, are simultaneously translated.’