Farther Than the Eye Can See, a new video exhibition by Kuwait-born artist Basma Alsharif, is currently underway  at Bait Al Shamsi, Arts Area in downtown Sharjah. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation, the exhibition is co-produced with the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture as part of Alsharif’s 2011 artist residency at the Sharjah Art Foundation. The exhibition will continue until Wednesday, 18 July.

Sharjah Art Foundation President Hoor Al-Qasimi stated:  “It has been a great pleasure to work again with Basma Alsharif and to help her realise this new installation through our Artist Residency Programme.  This is the second project Sharjah Art Foundation has commissioned from Basma. The first, We Began by Measuring Distance, was shown in the 2009 Sharjah Biennial and was awarded the Jury Prize.”

Over the course of 19 minutes, Farther Than The Eye Can See moves through various compositions across a four channel video installation in a darkened room. Basma Alsharif’s work explores how human beings relate to and internalize changes in life and politics shifts that occur within our lifetimes and those we carry with us from past generations. Experimenting with multiple media, in single channel works as well as video installations, she uses the anonymous individual as a vehicle for navigating through political history and collective memory

Alsharif is interested in how geo-political issues affect us both physically emotionally; how they can simultaneously affect us just as easily as we often disregard them. Using visual key codes, 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 and language become interchangeable and ultimately manifest as information to be experienced rather than understood.

Since 2007, Alsharif has worked between Chicago, Cairo, Amman, Beirut and Sharjah, developing works that attempt to reflect a multiplicity in vantage point and content. She has relied on the environments she lives in and experiences she has had to influence and drive these pieces. She looks at the unwritten language of how a landscape or urban environment functions: what defines and constitutes a place and how individuals relate to one another within and in relation to different places.

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