We Began By Measuring Distance (Basma Al Sharif)

We Began By Measuring Distance

Director: Basma Al Sharif

Duration: 00:19:01; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 59.475; Saturation: 0.054; Lightness: 0.169; Volume: 0.199; Cuts per Minute: 1.103

by Basma Al Sharif

"Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements become political ones, drawing an examination of how image and sound communicate history, tragedy, and the complication of Palestinian nationalism. We Began By Measuring Distance explores the ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic. "

Basma Al Sharif is a visual artist based in Beirut, Lebanon, and works with photography, film/video, sound, text and language. Her films stem from an exploration of how we comprehend visual communication at the most instinctual level. Using language as a response to the image, a discrepancy between what is being said and what is being seen wavers in-and-out of dissonance and harmony. At the core is a desire to reveal the unreliability of facts and history by breaking down representational mechanisms and manipulating how they visually communicate. Using fantasy, or the fantastical, as a method for distancing the viewer from politics, her films appeal to the viewer’s subjective desire for harmony in sound, image, and narrative.

Palestine
memory

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Images (and memory) in trouble

On a day as any other day
all our memories would become significant,
only in retrospect

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sea

Distant Memory.
16 mm footage from Basma's film, filmed in Chicago.
Link: https://pad.ma/XJ/editor/CI
(...to pass the time we indulged in a book memorializing our homeland our homeland truly is a history that is no longer within reach)

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