Peep-Hole presents La Visione di Carlo, Sacro e Profano (Carlo’s Vision, Sacred and Profane), the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy by Rosalind Nashashibi, developed in collaboration with Nomas Foundation, Rome. The exhibition takes the form of a dyptich divided in two venues subtitled respectively Sacred and Profane and Body Habits. Common element and leading thread of the two exhibitions is the new film Carlo’s Vision (2011) commissioned by Nomas Foudation and Peep-Hole and produced by the Stefano and Raffaella Sciarretta Collection. Carlo’s Vision is a 16mm film based on an episode in the unfinished novel Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Petrolio gives us a picture of the Italian contemporary world, a crucial contribution to the understanding of what happened in Italy between the Sixties and the Seventies. The artist moves from the vision of the main character, Carlo. Nashashibi’s intention is not to make the vision as Pasolini described it into a film but rather to shift the vision in today’s context and let it clash with reality. The structure, the main characters and props will be taken from the novel, but the rest will be left to reality and observation.

Petrolio was set at the end of the Sixties, Nashashibi’s film sets the vision on Via di Tor Pignattara this summer. Carlo perceives reality in a different intensity of time, light and colour to that experienced by the rest of the street. Nashashibi’s film takes a ritual and a vision from outside of time, and drops it into the most ordinary part of the day, creating a friction where the simultaneous realities rub against one another. La Visione di Carlo (Sacro e Profano) also features Shelter for a New Youth (2011), a mixed-media installation in which the artist first showed her interest in Petrolio. The work was completed earlier this year for Sharjah Biennial and it comprises photographs of male crotches and painted panels showing the hands of Mickey Mouse as the hands of Buddha. One hand is pointed upwards and the other downwards, in a gesture that suggests openness and acceptance but also ambivalence.

The research of Rosalind Nashashibi (1973) is focused on the aesthetic of everyday life in urban environments. The artist moves away from representation to privilege experience as the locus of consciousness. Often two elements are juxtaposed in order to make visible different layers of reality that co-exist in one moment, or a constructed scene, a fiction is set into a real situation. She mainly works with cinema where the melancholic drift of time passing place the viewer in a position of experiencing the present. Her most recent solo exhibitions include those at Tulips and Roses, Brussels (2010); ICA, London (2009); Bergen Kunstalle, Bergen (2009); Kustlerhaus, Stuttgart (2009); Presentation House, Vancouver (2008); Professional Gallery, OCAD, Toronto (2008); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2007); Art Basel Statements with Harris Lieberman (New York), Basel (2007); Kunsthalle, Basel (2004); Tate Britain, London (2004). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as: Time Again, SculptureCenter, New York (2011); The Art of Narration Changes with Time, Galerie Sprueth Magers, Berlin (2011); Erre (Variations Labyrinthiques), Pompidou Metz (2011-2012); Repetition Island, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Into the belly of a Dove, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2010); Sculpture of the Space Age, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009); Displaced, UCLA, Los Angeles (2003). She also participated at Sharjah Biennial X, Sharjah (2011); Manifesta 7, Trento (2008); Venice Biennale, Venice (2007, 2003); Momentum Nordic Biennial (2011, 2006); Berlin Biennial, Berlin (2008; with Lucy Skaer).