There’s a peacefulness surrounding Rosalind Nashashibi’s north London studio, found at the end of a residential road that curves into a wooded path. As the artist takes me up a steep set of stairs and along a deserted corridor on the top floor (no one else seems to be at work today), we might almost be in a castle, or the nearest you can get to one in Finsbury Park, not an area known for its air of enchantment. Inside, canvases hang on three sides of the room, or sit propped up on the floor. A book open to a page of Degas’s bronze sculptures of horses sits on a small table next to a sofa.

The Living Thread, 2025, by Rosalind Nashashibi © Courtesy of Stephen White & Co

Dressed in a chunky cream cardigan, jeans and burgundy trainers, Nashashibi is unmistakably chic and a lively speaker. Now 52, she could be taken for someone 20 years younger. Around us hang recent works that will shortly be leaving for an exhibition called* Stones* at KM21, a contemporary art museum in The Hague. The settings are only hinted at, often only made explicit in their titles: in one painting, called Palestine, c.1950, two women stand in darkness gazing at a much brighter figure wearing a thobe, a traditional form of Palestinian dress.

They will show alongside Nashashibi’s short film Electrical Gaza, which the Imperial War Museum commissioned in 2010 as part of its contemporary programme. The film was shot in the Strip in June 2014, just before Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, a seven-week war in which it killed more than 2,000 Palestinians following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank. In the 18-minute film, Nashashibi concentrates on quiet moments of daily life, depicting a place populated with palm trees, where horses bathe in the sea, women wade fully clothed into the water and men break into song in their living rooms. It’s a portrait of the place in all its complexity: men queue in frustration at the border crossings; boys play games, but also march as Hamas cadets. Viewed after the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and the two-year war in Gaza in which Israel has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians, the film seems both more beautiful and more macabre.

Nashashibi’s sketch of her daughter © Ina Lev

Nashashibi in front of Steadfastness, 2025 © Ina Lev

Nashashibi’s work has been garnering recognition for some years – she was a Turner Prize nominee in 2017 and, in 2020, became the inaugural artist in residence at the National Gallery in London under its modern and contemporary programme. But the Netherlands show marks a shift. This year is “the first time I’ve been asked to do anything related to Palestine since the Imperial War Museum asked me”, Nashashibi says. She sees it as signalling “a change in what people are willing to talk about and look at”. Yasmijn Jarram, curator of the KM21 exhibition, says she is interested in how the artist “merges the personal and the political in a very poetic way”.

This approach is second nature to Nashashibi. So much so that, although she’s eager to describe the making of individual works, she passes over her reasons for making them. We have to read between the lines. At first glance, Wait Another Week is a technically accomplished flower painting. Look closer, and there are skulls glowing in the shadowy background. Wait another week and the vivacious chrysanthemums will be dead.

Nashashibi in her studio in north London © Ina Lev

Works on paper in the studio © Ina Lev

Objects in her studio © Ina Lev

As the multi-medium exhibition demonstrates, Nashashibi is a versatile artist, used to moving between things. She was born in Croydon in 1973 to a Northern Irish mother and a Palestinian father who is from a prominent family in Jerusalem. The family moved to Chesterfield and Sheffield while her father studied for a PhD, returning to London when she was eight. She visited Jerusalem and the West Bank several times as a child (and Gaza, once, but she doesn’t remember it), but not again until she was an adult.

It was while studying painting during her BA at Sheffield Hallam University that she became hooked on films by the likes of Pasolini, Fassbinder, Wenders and Cassavetes. She decided to pick up a home-movie camera herself, and made a series of short films on 16mm but, after a succession of critical successes and prizes, she returned to painting a decade ago. There was a practical element to this: artists’ films have a precarious place in the art market; it’s no way to make money. But more than that, she says, the change was prompted by “wanting to make exhibitions in the light”.

Chrysanthemums, Hand with Stone, 2025, by Rosalind Nashashibi © Courtesy of Stephen White & Co

Her residency at The National Gallery in London followed, for which she displayed four paintings in sickly sweet colours alongside brooding baroque works by the Spanish Golden Age painter Diego Velázquez. *Phosphorus Malvolio *(2020), for instance, shows a pair of cross-gartered legs seen from the back and, between them, a figure observing us through a feather fan. Placed between Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus and his portrait of Philip IV, it played off the former’s allegory about looking. It’s typical of Nashashibi’s interest in making us question what we’re seeing; not to trip us up, but to make us more aware.

The title of the new exhibition,* Stones*, comes from the motif of a hand holding a stone seen in several of the compositions. Nashashibi is interested in “both the potential of throwing the stone, but also the feeling of holding the stone in your hand”. Stones about to be thrown in resistance, perhaps? But also, as she points out, “some of them really look like hearts”. Another painting shows two women dressed in black against a pastel background. A prostrate man is depicted beside them. They are “the first people I represented when I was thinking about people – in Palestine, I guess”, says Nashashibi. “It could be in Palestine. The man on the floor comes from a Goya painting and the others come from my imagination.” The sombre (perhaps mourning) figures are jarring against the sherbet pinks, purples and yellow. The colours are inviting; the composition uncomfortable.

Nashashibi sitting in front of (from left) Palestine, c. 1950, 2025, and Let’s Hide in Bed, 2025 © Ina Lev

Single Bed, 2023, by Rosalind Nashashibi © Courtesy of Stephen White & Co

Electrical Gaza is another case in point. At several key moments, scenes transform into animations reminiscent of a Studio Ghibli film (Nashashibi cites a moment in My Neighbour Totoro as a direct inspiration). In one of the most beautiful animated moments, children perch on a rail looking out to sea and a scooter passes along a coastal road, but the sight of four IDF soldiers holding guns provides a jarring element. It’s the only way, says Nashashibi, that she could capture what it felt like to be in the blockaded territory, an “enchanted place” in the sense of being under “a spell that goes round and round and back and binds you in”.

Special Cloth for a UN Worker II, 2025 © Courtesy of Stephen White & Co

She has been asked to revisit the film several times since the war began, most recently in public screenings at the University of Basel and the University of Córdoba in November. Nashashibi says she almost called the whole show in The Hague Leaving the Archive because “I was thinking of the fact that people now look at Electrical Gaza as an archive, which it never was before this genocide”. (Israel denies it has committed a genocide.)

There can be few artists who have had the meaning of a work changed for them in this way – but it also vindicates the kind of film she chose to make: not a documentary, but an attempt to catch a deeper reality. When it was first shown, Nashashibi says, “people heard all the time about Gaza being under siege, but they didn’t seem to understand what that means. I think now they understand, retrospectively, what that meant.”

Stones* by Rosalind Nashashibi is at KM21 until 17 May 2026*