Jananne Al-Ani

"Shadow Sites II is a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and man-made activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures. Seen from above, the landscape appears abstracted, its buildings flattened and its inhabitants invisible to the human eye. Only when the sun is at its lowest, do the features on the ground, the archaeological sites and settlements come to light. Such ‘shadow sites’ when seen from the air, map the latent images held by the landscape’s surface. Much like a photographic plate, the landscape itself holds the potential to be exposed, thereby revealing the memory of its past.

Historically, representations of the Middle Eastern landscape, from William Holman Hunt’s 1854 painting The Scapegoat to media images from the 1991 Desert Storm campaign have depicted the region as uninhabited and without sign of civilisation. Shadow Sites II recreates the aerial vantage point of such missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the land it surveys. The film burrows into the landscape as one image slowly dissolves into another, like a mineshaft tunnelling deep into a substrate of memories preserved over time. "

Statement by Sharmini Pereira in collaboration with the artist

1966 born in Kirkuk, Iraq and lives in London, UK.

Jananne Al-Ani works with photography, film and video, and has a longstanding interest in the power of testimony and the documentary tradition, be it through intimate recollections of absence and loss or the exploration of more official accounts of historic events.

She studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 1997. She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at Darat al Funu, Amman (2010); Art Now, Tate Britain (2005) and the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum, London (2011); Closer, Beirut Art Centre (2009); The Screen-Eye or the New Image: 100 videos to rethink the world, Casino Luxembourg (2007); Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006) and The World is a Stage: Stories Behind Pictures, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2005).

Jananne has also co-curated touring exhibitions including Veil (2003-04) and Fair Play (2001-02). Recipient of the East International Award and the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award, her work can be found in public collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Modern, London; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC and Darat al Funun, Amman. 

www.janannealani.net

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