SALON POPULAIRE (KUNSTSAELE BERLIN)
Opening Wednesday 09.02. 18:00-21:00
daily 11:00-20:00
The Story of Milk & Honey is a series of interrelated projects that present the visual, textual, and sound explorations resulting from the failure to write a love story set in the Middle East. The work is comprised of three photography projects: Corniche Beirut, Original Family Archives, Les Sauvages, and a short video: The Story of Milk and Honey.
The video, an experimental documentary, tells the story of an unnamed individual who travels to Beirut, Lebanon to write a love story. Through voice-over narration of what ensues, the video details repeated failed attempts to distinguish the political body from the subjective experience. The unnamed individual, lost in his research, transpires into a journey of images, letters, songs, and an ultimate confusion of love for patriotism.
The photographs are presented as material testaments of the failures: Corniche Beirut: a single image taken from a selection of photographs of anonymous people on Beirut’s Corniche each Sunday. Original Family Archives: a collection of images of people without faces, taken from the narrator’s family photographs and from photographs belonging to families the narrator does not know. Les Sauvages: pages excerpted from a book on nature and the environment represented as a text with no plants and a redrawn illustration.
The works can be seen simultaneously as autonomous projects and dependent works. The visual content is bound together by an exploration of how we perceive information, understand facts, history, images and sound, and how to identify the individual in the midst of the material.
Basma Alsharif, born in 1983 Kuwait, US citizen of Palestinian origin. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally including Manifesta 8 (2010), Toronto International Film Festival (2010), the London Palestine Film Festival, London (2010), the 9th Edition of the Sharjah Biennial (2009). She lives and works in Beirut,Lebanon.
The Story of Milk and Honey, single channel video projection with headphones, 10 minutes; Corniche Beirut, inkjet prints from 35mm negatives; Original Familiy Archives, inkjet prints from 35mm negatives; Les Sauvages, Inkjet prints from flatbed scans of original and found material; produced with the Fundación Marcelino Botín Grant for Visual Arts Fund.
