Farther Than the Eye Can See

Overview

Basma Al Sharif’s work explores how we relate to and internalise the geo-political shifts that occur within our lifetimes and those we carry with us from past generations. Through experimentation with multiple media in single channel and video installations, she uses the anonymous individual as a vehicle for navigating through political history and collective memory.

Al Sharif is interested in how near and far away geo-political issues affect us physically and/or emotionally; how they can simultaneously affect us just as easily as we can disregard them. Using visual codes that weave us through forests of a carefully selected range of materials, her aim is to decentralize place, content, and medium. There is never one point of focus in her work but instead an attempt to create spaces where facts, numbers, photographs, songs, language etc become interchangeable and ultimately manifest as information to be experienced rather than understood.

Farther than the Eye Can See is a new multi-channel video installation developed during Al Sharif’s 2011 Sharjah Art Foundation Residency that uses a story from the past to question what lies ahead in the future.

Basma Al Sharif was awarded a Jury Prize at the Sharjah Biennial 9 for her 2009 video work We Began By Measuring Distance. She received an MFA from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007 and works between Cairo, Beirut, Amman, Sharjah and Chicago. Her work has shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally.