Rosalind Nashashibi: Get Me A Stone

For her institutional solo exhibition, Get Me A Stone, at Artium Museoa, Vitoria-Gasteiz (ES), Nashashibi presented a series of paintings produced between 2021 and 2026, as well as the film Occupation of The Inner Life  (2026). Both the space and time they refer to reflect her emotional and political engagement 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 acknowledgement 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.

The stones alluded to in the title are symbols of resistance. Various paintings depict hands holding stones as an initial gesture in response to subjugation. Stones, the mineral element, construct an architecture in which life unfolds, although they also provide a space to rebel against the oppression of occupation.

History and memory interweave certain materialities in Nashashibi’s work, the everyday that constructs ghostly moments in memory – whose memory – as in Palestine, c. 1950 and Steadfastness (both 2025), which reaffirm an idea of continuity, of a temporality that resists determinism, essential for affirming a future. The beds, the clothes, the acronym UNRWA constitute a distant and continuous landscape made of diffuse textures.

Get Me a Stone  also presents the film Occupation of The Inner Life  (2026) that 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.

About the Artist

Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973, London, UK) received her BA in Painting from Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK), after which she attended the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (UK), where she received her MFA. As part of her Master’s degree, Nashashibi participated in a three-month exchange program at CalArts, CA (US), in 1999. In 2020, Nashashibi became artist in residence at the National Gallery in London (UK). She was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017, and represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennale (IT). Her work has been included in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, Sharjah 10, and Gothenburg Biennial. She was the first woman to win the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. 

Nashashibi has had solo shows at KM21, Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); ARCH, Athens (GR); Melas Martinos, Athens (GR); Musée Art Contemporain Carré d’Art, Nîmes (FR); Radvila Palace Museum of Art for CAC, Vilnius (LT); Vienna Secession, Vienna (AT); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (NL); The High Line, New York, NY (US); The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (US); Imperial War Museum, London (UK); and ICA, London (UK).

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