Nashashibi/Skaer: Our Magnolia

Magnolia flowers start to unfold on screen in the dark hush of the projection room, creating a false expectation of quiet introspection: a close up of Paul Nash’s 1944 painting, Flight of the Magnolia, where a large white flower blends in amongst clouds, followed by photos of increasingly colourful magnolia flowers is suddenly broken by a monotone beach and a succession of lingering shots of a dead whale. Throughout the film, the prevalent sense of foreboding increases until almost overwhelming – the film is automatically triggered by the viewer’s entrance, this cold and mechanical quality then mirrored by the jerky succession of photos, as the delicate flowers are replaced by the dead whale’s grey bones and brown, dried husk. The film then jumps to a series of photos of Margaret Thatcher poised like a waxy magnolia blossom, staring at a fixed point off-camera.

Nashashibi/Skaer’s new collaborative work relies on fear-based analogies, keeping the audience alert and forbidding it to passively gaze at the original aesthetic images. Paul Nash’s altered view of the sky after the air bombings of WWII is echoed in the shots of planes and people crying in airports, exploring post-9/11 anxieties anchored in the general subconscious. Margaret Thatcher’s determined gaze towards the sky can be interpreted both as cold resolution and fear of what might appear from between the clouds.

As the film settles back onto Nash’s painted flower, the audience is made to reconsider the original image – the violence inherent in Nash’s original vision opened up by Skaer/Nashashibi’s perceptive and unsettling film.