Sharif Waked 

Chic Point. Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints

Video-installation -  Haifa / Nazareth


Festival Complicitats 2008

︎CCCB - Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

25/02 - 01/03 | 11:00-20:00 

Spanish Premiere


In Chic Point. Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003), Palestinean artist Sharif Waked plays with the intersection of the cultural and political in Palestinian life by investigating the absurd idea of designing fashion for traversing Israeli checkpoints. Set to pulsating electronic music, the video begins on a catwalk where a parade of men models scants clothing designed for interrogation. The gratuitously exposed flesh alludes to the strip searches that Palestinians regularly experience at border crossings. This reference is made explicit as the video transports the viewer from the catwalk to the West Bank and Gaza through a series of stills showing these violent searches. The work satirically signals the body as a charged site of cultural victimization, examining the sexualized gaze of fashion within a political framework.


Sharif Waked is a Palestinean visual artist that was born in Nazareth. He  studied fine art and philosophy at Haifa University (1983–86). Primarily video, his work critically engages the prejudices, propaganda, and institutional violence that inform Middle Eastern politics. By creating striking juxtapositions between the representations of Arabs and Islam in the media and injustices experienced in reality, Waked reveals the ways that power, politics, and aesthetics are powerfully inscribed on the surface of everyday life.