The Brooklyn Rail

Having Some Space: Dissociation and Generative Embodiment in Basma Alsharif's Ouroboros

Perhaps it’s the protective, self-preservationist impulse extending from one racialized creative to another that prompts concerns of limitation with self-identification, but Alsharif’s modes of direction deftly precipitate the necessity of her insistence, and then collapse these concerns altogether as it becomes clear that her work speaks far beyond borders and barriers: from the vantage point of one particular socio-political locus, she excavates wider, apparently enduring truths of human relations and leaves us somewhere else altogether, making sense of the nebulous matter in between. It’s this cycling-through from mystification to elucidation and back which will characterize the experience of engaging with Alsharif’s newest work.