Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006 16 mm film, film strip Courtesy of the artists and doggerfisher

Rosalind Nashashibi (b.1973) uses her 16mm camera as a catalyst, an accelerator of the real. Her films investigate the divide between reality and its extra-dimension - which could be fiction, the world of archetypes or spiritual realms, combining an interest in epic narrative with close observation of details. Throughout her work, she has observed small communities (Hreash House, 2004 and Midwest, 2002); investigated the unconsciously symbolic function of objects (Park Ambassador, 2004, Proximity Machines, 2007) and of a human standing in for an idea (Ambassador, 2004, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer); she has found mythological figures in the urban fabric of New York (Eyeballing, 2006) and attempted to reanimate encased objects in a museum (Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, in collaboration with Lucy Skaer). Her recent production focuses on the notion of bachelor machines. Bachelor Machines Part 1 combines the observation of a closed community - a cargo ship crew - with the attribution of an anthropomorphic character to the ship as a machine in itself. Conversely, Bachelor Machines Part 2 revolves around Thomas Bayrle's meditation on the invention of the machine, in particular the diesel engine, as man's materialisation of the desires once conveyed abstractly through the repetition of the rosary. Nashashibi conceives her practice more as a tool offered to the viewer to interrogate the world with her, than a report on our current state of affairs. Winner of Beck's Futures in 2003, Nashashibi has had solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel and CCA Glasgow (2004). In 2006 she participated in Momentum, Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway and in an OCA residency in February 2007 with a later solo show at the Chisenhale. In 2007 she also represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and exhibited in Contour, third Biennial for Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium and at Matrix, Berkeley Art Museum Berkeley California.