Berlin-based Palestinian artist Basma Al Sharif uses cinema, photography and installation to investigate the paradox of proximity and distance—how global events can shape us intimately yet remain easy to ignore. Her film We Began by Measuring Distance (2009), which won a Jury Prize at Sharjah Biennial 9 (2009), opens with aerial views of Gaza’s skeletal architecture. A cold, detached voice introduces the central premise—an anonymous collective, numbed by boredom, invents a game of measurements to pass time. They move from quantifying distances between objects and forms to spaces between cities presumably hosting peace conferences on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The narrative gradually slips into the realm of the ‘virgin forest’—land still free from human interference—alongside footage of Gaza’s threatened ecology. Drawing from western situationist and psycho-geographic cinema whose characteristics include the use of a dispassionate narrator and speculative, post-human landscapes, Al Sharif’sfilm surveys the nuances of colonial legacy through borders, memory and abstract cartographies.