Nashashibi/Skaer: Chimera

Viewing one animal through the outline of another, Bear pivots on how the body of a sheep is transformed from within, leading to the emergence of a new creature, a lamb. Situating birth as an archetypal inscription of metamorphosis, the film considers how the bear and lamb, the predator and the prey, the wild and the farmed, inhabit the same body or limits. Suggestive of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bear contrasts the act of giving birth to the mythical transformations of Zeus and other gods into animals on earth. The soundtrack of the film developed in collaboration with Cantonese opera artist Zhuo Peili, features the word ‘bear’ sung in both English and Cantonese alongside traditional Cantonese opera compositions selected from Zhou’s previous works. Bear also provides the starting point for a new woodblock print produced in collaboration with Chinese artist Xu Zhiwei.

In Chimera, Nashashibi/Skaer expose the slippages of context and meaning implicit in moments of transformation. Calling forth a mythic territory rife with contested cultural histories and unsettled archetypes, Chimera deploys the associative visual logic characteristic of our unstoppable contemporary, challenging us to visually speculate on the inherent uncertainty of the real.

Biography

Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer are artists with international solo careers, but they also collaborate as Nashashibi/Skaer. Nashashibi/Skaer met in Glasgow and began working together in 2005. Their films have shown internationally to critical acclaim at venues such as the Berlin Biennial 5, Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art and the ICA London and they are represented in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pompidou, FRAC Marseille, and Arts Council Collection, UK. Recent works have taken existing artworks as their starting point, such as Why Are You Angry? which utilises Gauguin’s vision of the south seas. This film, premiered at Documenta 14, and formed part of a retrospective exhibition for Tate St Ives 2018. In 2019, Nashashibi/Skaer had a major show Future Sun at SMAK in Ghent. This brought together their solo practises and collaboration for the first time and was a site of fruitful cross pollination for both. A recent film Lamb resulted – their first collaboration with composers and musicians. The sequel, Bear, produced in collaboration with Cantonese Opera singers and musicians will debut at OCAT Shenzhen for CURRENT Phase Four.

Rosalind Nashashibi won the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2003, represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017. Lucy Skaer represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009.