Nashashibi/Skaer: Chimera | Preview & In-conversation

About the exhibition

From the ancient Greek for a female goat, ‘chimera’ today refers to a beast or an idea composed of incongruous parts, an illusion or fabrication of the mind. The exhibition traverses art history, mythology and the cyclical nature of new life and new ideas. Fusion and slippages of meaning produce an associative and discursive mediation on transformation through which chimera, a composite being that in its very form unsettles the possibility of an archetype, encourages us to doubt the dominance of the real. 

At the heart of Chimera are three collaborative films which combine photographic images with musical composition, drawing and painting, skewing the images to form new experiences.

Working in response to the architectural space of Cooper Gallery, Nashashibi/Skaer examine the nuances of each other’s artistic practice by choreographing collaborative films with prints and new solo works, bronze and stone sculpture from Lucy Skaer and painting by Rosalind Nashashibi, adding new meanings and destabilising the boundaries between the formal qualities inherent to each particular artwork and their respective practices.

Offering moments of serene contemplation and reverie, Chimera and its complex ambiguity implores us all to take note of the transformative potential that hovers among everything we see, hear and touch.



Read more on our exhibition page. 

 

Artists' biographies

Nashashibi /Skaer 

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. Their new film Bear, a sequel to Lamb, was premiered as part of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland (Phase Four) at OCAT Shenzhen, a major international collaboration between Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee and leading contemporary art venues in China.

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.



 

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based filmmaker and painter of Palestinian and Northern Irish heritage. Her films use both documentary and speculative languages, where observations from her own life and the world around her are merged with paintings, fictional or sci-fi elements; often to propose models of collective living. Her paintings likewise operate on another level of subjective experience, they frame arenas or pools of potential where people or animals may appear, often sharing the picture plane with their own context of signs and apparitions.

Nashashibi has exhibited in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah  X, She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017 and won Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. She represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennial. Her most recent solo shows include CAC Vilnius, Vienna Secession, CAAC Seville, Chicago Art Institute and Kunstinstuut Melly, Rotterdam. She was National Gallery artist in residence 2020. 

Lucy Skaer is a sculptor whose work slows ideas down to abstractions and makes them concrete. She once put a whale skeleton behind a partitioned wall so that it was only visible one sliver at time. She represented the ancient Terracotta Army of Chinese funerary figures as 530 tenmoku-glazed stoneware lozenges—an homage, in part, to the British ceramicist Bernard Leach. Who makes history? What is the “grammar” of sameness and difference? How do ideas unfold?  These are questions of Skaer’s art.

Recent solo shows include The Bloomberg Space in London,2020, SMAK, Ghent, 2019, Talbot Rice in Edinburgh, 2018, Tate St Ives, 2018, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin 2017, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, 2017, Institute Melly (Formerly Witte de With) in Rotterdam, 2016, Yale Union in Portland, 2013, Tramway in Glasgow, 2013, and Sculpture Center in New York, 2012, Kunsthalle Basel, 2009. 

Major group exhibitions include the Carnegie International, 2018, Documenta 14, 2017. 

Lucy Skaer received a BA from the Environmental Art Department at Glasgow School of Art. She was a 2009 Turner Prize nominee. She is at work on a commission for the Thames Tideway Sculpture Park for 2024 and will be a forthcoming resident at the Chinati Foundation. 

Access

The gallery is on two floors. First floor has ramped access and disabled toilet.

Second floor is accessible via lift and for wheelchair access via a stairclimber. The in-conversation will take place on the second floor. 

Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access so we can arrange support.

Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides.



If you require live captions for the in-conversation please email to request.

All enquiries please contact: exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk

 

Image credits

Top: Nashashibi/Skaer, Bear, 2021 (film still)

Middle: Exhibition Preview and In-conversation photos by Sally Jubb.

Funding support

Chimera is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and British Council.