WHAT TO DO?  (2012)

What To Do? presents a 7 video screen installation of an engagement with cultural experiences of the Middle East through the compulsive male habit of handling religious prayer beads or tasbih (what we in the West refer to as “worry beads”) in response to the oscillating conditions of being worried or unworried about major life issues and concerns in the region.

Catalogue essayist James Scarborough says of What To Do?, “Nasr ‘draws a bead’ on religion’s supposed ability to effect gender equality and world peace. For such a simple and elegant installation, the piece is incredibly rich in associations and diagnoses. Subtle and savage, accommodating and incisive, it functions on the distinction between the secular and non-secular use of beads, mediated through the offices of another sacred space, an art gallery.”[1]

In another essay Pippa Milne describes this work accordingly: “Social, political and intellectual forces that shape contemporary society are inevitably fraught with confusion and uncertainty. Questions are plentiful. Answers are few. In viewing What To Do? with its hands that compulsively worry away, ad infinitum, one oscillates between sensing the cyclical and infinite nature of the human condition, and a pressing sense that some decisions must be reached.”[2]

[1] James Scarborough is an art, theatre and film critic for Huffingtown Post since it began in 2010, and a former member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle

[2] Pippa Milne lives and works in Melbourne. Writer and curator, CCP Catalogue Essay, August 2012.