VITORIA-GASTEIZ.- Get Me A Stone features a series of paintings produced between 2021 and 2026 by Rosalind Nashashibi. Both the space they refer to and the time frame reflect the emotional and political engagement of the artist with the current situation in the Gaza Strip.
Although it is evident in Nashashibi’s work that her two main media, film and painting, permeate each other, in the case of the aforementioned works there is something that painting can bring forth with particular force, counteracting the brutality of the images we have witnessed in the last two and a half years, without turning its back on the necessary acknowledgment of that violence. A space emerges in the pictorial act that goes beyond representation, where the symbolic appears as a way of transcending the illustrative, while also activating the affective as a means to situate oneself. For Nashashibi, the history of painting provides a constant reflection on composition in relation to the historical moments in which certain works emerge. But painting may also be a way of relating to what endures in the distance, a way of working on the distance imposed by exile.
Get Me A Stone also presents the film Occupation of The Inner Life (2026), which links the actual labour of painting—the production process and on display—with family situations, indicating the affections that ultimately underlie artistic endeavours and political commitments.
In 2021, Rosalind Nashashibi exhibited two films at Artium Museoa as part of the Gallery Z programme as well as the painting A Wider Kind of Love, which was produced during her residency at the museum in preparation for the exhibition. The painting was added to the museum’s permanent collection in 2023. Nashashibi is also represented in the collection by the recent acquisition of the film Electrical Gaza (2015). Both works can currently be seen in the museum’s Gallery A2 as part of the group exhibition Looking Through a Circle in a Circle of Looks.
As part of the exhibition’s opening on June 12, the museum will host a conversation between Rosalind Nashashibi and editor, curator and poet Mahmoud Alshaer (Rafah, 1990) based on their artistic practices. The conversation forms part of the programme for the AMA Study Centre’s fifth seminar, which includes a workshop led by the philosopher Amador Fernández-Savater (Madrid, 1974).
The AMA Study Centre was launched last January as a space for critical, situated reflection, research and speculation on contemporary art, its potential and openings, closely tied to the museum’s exhibition programme. Since its launch, the various seminars organised have featured professionals such as the writer and feminist theorist Françoise Vergès (Paris, 1952), artists Marwa Arsanios (Washington D.C., 1978), Nader Koochaki (San Sebastián, 1983) and Kimia Kamvari (Cologne, 1986), curator Leire Vergara (Bilbao, 1973), filmmaker and writer Manthia Diawara (Mali, 1953), choreographer an artist Ana Pi (Brazil, 1986), scholar Ros Murray (Oxford, UK, 1982) and filmmaker and researcher Ed Webb-Ingall (London, 1982), among others.
The AMA Study Centre is conceived as a continuously evolving framework that considers different issues that cut across artistic contexts: ways of constructing political memory and imagination, modes of inhabiting the commons, languages of critique and writing, and the possibility of reflecting on and rehearsing desirable futures from a constantly shifting temporality.
