Painting (Painting)

Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings incorporate motifs drawn from her day-to-day environment, often reworked with multiple variations. The development of colour palettes in her painting work could be compared to the work in her films where she delicately draws an internal visual language which provides the viewer equal space to her protagonists. Possible readings of her work are left deliberately open, encouraging thought in terms of association rather than the imposition of a narrative structure.

Painting (Painting)

Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The green acrylic paint used for the subject’s skin in Maka Panau / Tinea Vesicolor (2005), for example, evokes cultural associations between phenotype and diseases such as hypochromic anemia, a blood-related illness historically diagnosed by the green-hued tone it produced in a patient’s pallor. Staring at the viewer a forlorn gaze, Sulaiman’s subject appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition.