Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins
Basma al-Sharif
Imane Farès Gallery, Paris


When I first heard about Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins, I wasn’t yet familiar with Basma al-Sharif’s work. I attended because it felt urgent — necessary — to be present in a space where a contemporary art gallery, rooted in the West yet firmly attentive to voices from outside it, was opening itself to narratives often ignored, silenced, or violently erased. Imane Farès Gallery, long committed to African and Arab artists, offered more than a venue: it offered a platform for resistance, memory, and testimony.

Basma al-Sharif speaks with a gentleness that holds an unmistakable weight. Her voice is both tender and unwavering — charged with grief, love, and resilience. From the beginning of her talk, it is clear that she is confronting the very difficulty of creating art at a time like this — how to make space for beauty and complexity amid an ongoing genocide. Since October 2023, the Israeli state has intensified its campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing in Palestine — but this is not new. It is a continuum. And as Basma reminds us, even in the most unbearable moments, Palestinians are still filmmakers, artists, writers, bakers, teachers, mothers, fathers, children. They are still here. They are still dreaming.

This exhibition is not an escape from that reality, but a quiet defiance against its erasure. The works on view — both new and from previous bodies of work — are not documents of suffering but acts of survival. They resonate with the intimate and the collective, the remembered and the lost. There is also a continuity with the newly published Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins, whose title itself reclaims and subverts a dehumanizing Zionist trope — a phrase used to legitimize colonization and erase Palestinian land, life, and sovereignty. Basma reclaims the insult and turns it into a poetic terrain of resistance.

Her five-minute film, screened as part of the show, is a tribute to her cousin Rasha, whose life was taken by the war. Shot on horseback, either at dawn or dusk, it captures a barren yet beautiful landscape, an emptied place that still breathes. The camera drifts gently, quietly — as if searching for a trace, a pulse, a promise. There are almost no words in the film, but its silence speaks volumes. It becomes a eulogy, a love letter, and a refusal to forget.

Back in the gallery, surrounded by works that trace a geography of displacement and longing, I return alone. In that solitude, the exhibition feels even more intimate. These are not simply images — they are fragments of a people’s persistence. They carry the weight of a shared history and the dream of a future still possible.

Basma al-Sharif’s work moves through time, memory, and political urgency with a poetic precision that is profoundly liminal — not in orientation alone, but in the very structure of her art. It resists borders, fixed identities, and singular truths. Her narratives slip between fiction and documentary, presence and absence, and call us into the liminal, the in-between — the exile and the echo. In that refusal to conform, her work carries subversion as a mode of resistance, of dreaming otherwise, of enduring and imagining life beyond systems of domination.

There is no freedom until Palestine is free. Basma al-Sharif reminds us — gently, fiercely — that art can carry the memory of what was, the truth of what is, and the possibility of what may still come.

Free Palestine.

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Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins can be seen at Imane Farès Gallery from 24 May - 19 July 2025

Text by JP Galvão (b. 1993, Brasil) a curator and mediator based in Paris, FR.