132 Look And You Shall Find Jananne Al-Ani 133 photography Tracking down the hidden history of the Middle East and of Iraq, the land in which she spent her childhood, is something of a creative quest for Iraqi/ Irish artist Jananne Al-Ani. Myrna Ayad meets her at her London studio to discuss the semiotics of disappearance and appearance, and what it is that drives Al-Ani to dig deep beneath the surface. T Opening spread: The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People (work in progress). 2010. Production still. Variable dimensions. Photography by Adrian Warren. Courtesy the artist. he bright London sun peeks between the trees facing Jananne Al-Ani’s studio and bleaches the walls. Every- thing is washed-out, except for the displayed maps of the Arab world. “I’m going to do something with my Irish heritage because I’m tired of curators describing me as a ‘Middle Eastern’ artist!” she grins, and the seemingly silent illumination is interrupted by her laugh, which has a hearty timbre. Her head swings back, her dark hair with it, and a shaft of light catches her piercing eyes – variations of green, grey and blue. “I don’t like being called [just] a feminist artist, a Middle Eastern artist or a woman artist, because I am all of those things and being just one of them is not enough,” she says, “it would be like throwing my art education away!” Having been born in Kirkuk, Iraq to an Iraqi father and an Irish mother doesn’t make Al-Ani just an Iraqi artist either. “Well, how can I be?” she asks, “how can I stand up and call myself an Iraqi artist when the reality of life for artists who have continued to live and work in Iraq is so extreme in comparison to mine?” It is not these particular questions of identity which concern Al-Ani, but rather how her art can be used as a process of enlightenment with regard to politics, geography, history and gender issues. 134 photography From the series Landscapes. Cemetery (Grounded Iraqi Airways Planes). 2008. C-Type. 11 x 17 cm. Courtesy the artist. “I don’t like being called [just] a feminist artist, a Middle Eastern artist or a woman artist because I am all of those things and being just one of them is not enough.” 135 photography TThe Butterfly Effect filming when his camera jammed unexpectedly. The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People (work in As we sip coffee, Al-Ani discusses her latest film Al-Ani, however, was concerned with the “narra- progress). 2010. Production stills. Variable dimensions. Photography by and photographic project The Aesthetics of Dis- tives of disappearance in the Middle East and, of Adrian Warren. Courtesy the artist. appearance: A Land Without People, the first part course, in Iraq”; basically, how bodies are disposed of which will be showcased in her forthcoming of following mass genocides and wars. “After the solo show at Amman’s Darat Al-Funun on 18 fall of Saddam Hussein, the Armenian genocide, May. The new work continues certain preoccu- the disappearance of Palestinian villages and the pations apparent in Al-Ani’s 1991 Untitled (Gulf many wars in Lebanon, how were people able to War Series), comprising 20 small, black-and-white come to terms with the ‘disappeared’?” she asks. photographs that are her way of offering an ‘al- Essentially, her curiosity was drawn towards ternative’ narrative of Iraq’s history. She had felt what lurks beneath the Middle East’s vast land- that the Western media did not present an all- scapes, rolling hills, fertile fields and wide open encompassing, all-inclusive reportage or view plains. Aesthetically beautiful as they are, ‘six feet of Iraq, almost as though the country was void under’ the terrain are historical warzones of un- of history and with no future prospects. “Britain’s accounted for, unknown and unearthed civilians. got amazing art historians and scholars in the How many stories can these lands narrate? And fields of Oriental and Arab history, but the general just how much can their beauty deceive? Al-Ani population is by and large unaware of Iraq’s his- then stumbled on an article on forensic anthropol- tory,” she says. “Some couldn’t tell the difference ogist and ‘butterfly hunter’ Margaret Cox. In 1999, between Iran and Iraq! The perception was lim- a significant number of the wildflower Artemisia ited to camels, Sinbad, Ali Baba and flying carpets, vulgaris, also known as mugwort, flourished in the and only recently, Kirkuk’s been on the news and Balkans, attracting clouds of blue butterflies. The it’s like, finally, the place I was born in is getting dead had changed the soil’s nutrient levels, which some recognition, none of it is positive though!” encouraged the growth of mugwort and thereby Al-Ani became intrigued with French cultural allowed the butterflies to lead Cox to the mass theorist Paul Virilio’s longstanding interest in the graves. Ironically, in ancient times, mugwort was use of cinematic techniques in military conflicts used to ward off evil spirits to travellers. Remarka- of the 20th century. In his landmark 1980 essay, bly, Cox has also uncovered 300,000 bodies killed The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Virilio recounts under Hussein’s rule in Hilla and Musayyib in Iraq. how film pioneer Georges Méliès accidentally “It starts off like a walk through the country,” says discovered how to ‘disappear’ the subjects he was Al-Ani, “everything is so beautiful on the surface 136 “Britain’s got amazing art historians and scholars in the fields of Oriental and Arab history, but the general population is by and large unaware of Iraq’s history.” Facing page: Untitled l & ll. 1996. Silver gelatin prints. 120 x 180 cm each. Courtesy the artist. Above: Untitled (Gulf War Series). 1991. Silver gelatin prints. 16 x 16 cm each. Courtesy the artist. 139 PHOTOGRAphy but how horrible things are underneath.” I recall Lebanese ‘contemporary historian’ Akram Zaatari positive. “People think growing up in Iraq meant it was a difficult childhood; there were constraints “It was (Canvas 6.1) and his recent book and exhibition, Earth of Endless Secrets, which as Zaatari explained, of course, but we a wonderful childhood,” she says. It is those years and their repercussions in working with “the earth has many secrets that need to be de- ported.” It is interesting to consider how these politics, media, memory and perceptions that continue to inform Al-Ani’s work. Switching off photography two artists from the Middle East have brought the horrors of the region’s past into mainstream lights, closing curtains, painting car headlights, hosting cousins in army fatigues, being told not that led to film Contemporary art. And in picturesque form, too. Al-Ani flew to the USA to research photo- to speak English at checkpoints or say anything about Hussein and “watching the ‘bogeyman’ and video. graphic archives and found, among others, re- connaissance images of First World War trenches caught on hazy TV footage” must have seemed like an extended, elaborate game for Al-Ani. There was taken by the American Air Force and which “look like beautiful abstract images”. She took hundreds But in reality and in recollection, she now knows that these were indicators of “some- something of aerial and ground shots of American and Mid- dle Eastern deserts – it is impossible to identify thing big about to happen”. And it is precisely this memory probe into perceptions of then about the the locations, and that is precisely her intention. She hopes to incorporate firsthand accounts by and now that really defines her oeuvre. “I’m not surprised that a lot of artists from the region stillness of people who have survived and witnessed geno- cides and wars into the work, including victims work with documentary, archiving and the way in which history is constructed,” she says. photographs of the 9/11 tragedy. “I don’t want to attribute the quotes to a particular person or event, it’s like one Her parents had met in the UK when her fa- ther, “part of the first wave of Iraqis to study in that I wanted to narrative,” says Al-Ani, echoing Zaatari: “the war in Lebanon or the Middle East is something that the UK” was pursuing his degree in engineering. The couple moved to Kirkuk where Al-Ani’s father preserve while can be talked about as a universal experience.” worked for the Iraqi Petroleum Company. She recalls memories of summers by the pool, long, introducing The Bottomless wells hot drives to and from Kirkuk and Baghdad and evenings when “all the adults would sit in a cir- the elements of Memory In much the same way, Al-Ani’s intention for 1001 cle talking all night and the many cousins would run around.” Just prior to the onset of the Iran-Iraq of time and Nights (1998) was to use storytelling as a route to explore memory. Increasingly popular among the region’s Contemporary artists is the use of video war, Al-Ani moved to the UK with her mother and sisters, settling in Cambridge in 1980. “I remember wanting to be an astronaut, then a ballerina and narrative.” as a modern-day successor to the traditional form then a brain surgeon,” laughs Al-Ani, “but I had al- of Arabian storytelling. “It was working with pho- ways wanted to be an artist.” She initially trained tography that led to film and video,” she explains, as a painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art, “there was something about the stillness of pho- graduating with a Fine Art Diploma in 1989. “It ran tographs that I wanted to preserve while intro- a very traditional, conservative studio system on ducing the elements of time and narrative.” Al-Ani, one hand, but had a radical complementary stud- her mother and three sisters have featured prom- ies programme run by Robin Klassnik [director of inently in her body of work over the years. “Yes, Matt’s Gallery] on the other,” she says. Al-Ani strug- they are a recurring motif,” she says of her family, gled at Byam Shaw, asked too many questions “you see them changing over time.” In 1001 Nights, and was far more interested in ideas than in doing Al-Ani asked her cast to each articulate a recurring much actual work. “I probably stuck with painting dream which takes place in Iraq. “I am trying to longer than I should have, but I was insistent that interrogate memory,” she says. Interestingly, there painting could be done in a way that had a politi- were numerous crossovers in each woman’s narra- cal subtext and could discuss ideas apart from be- tion – they all talked about the war, or as Al-Ani puts ing decorative or narrative.” By then, she had taken it, “essentially, they were talking about their fears.” up photography, attended workshops and even Al-Ani’s memories of her 13 years in Iraq are began photographing her mother and sisters. 140 Eros dui in libero, nec tristique non est maecenas, felis duis dolor sem, lobortis id fusce integer scelerisque felis enim. Etiam ullamcorper vestibulum ridiculus ac morbi nunc. Untitled. 2002. Single channel video projection. Variable Looking at Me Looking What resulted was a body of work which dimensions. Courtesy the artist. at You continued Al-Ani’s exploration into “the politics By the mid 1990s, she was exhibiting her work of looking” while examining the Western fascina- regularly and went on to complete an MA in tion with the veil. In Untitled I & II (1996), Al-Ani’s photography from the Royal College of Art in charged large scale black and white photographs, 1997. It was during her MA that she came across five women (her family and herself ) in various Malek Alloula’s book, The Colonial Harem, which stages of veiling, gaze back at the audience. The investigates postcards of Algerian women made women confront the viewer in a gradual veiling, or during French colonisation. Al-Ani became fas- unveiling, of the face, depending on whether you cinated with the Western perception of the Ori- read the picture from left to right, as with English ent, especially as many Orientalist painters and script, or from right to left, as in Arabic. Al-Ani’s Un- photographers had never visited the region and titled I won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait relied solely on fantasy and imagination. She was Award in 1996; a photographic diptych was sold interested in the Western focus on the image of at the October 2008 Dubai Christie’s auction for the ‘Oriental’ woman and the particular fascina- $60,000 and editions of this work are in the collec- tion with the veil. “The veil is such a confronta- tions of the V&A in London and the Smithsonian tional object to the Western viewer, so much Institution in Washington DC. “It’s the first work can be misinterpreted and it’s surrounded by that got any attention in the Arab world,” says Al- clichés,” she says, “the veil is either seen as op- Ani and like much of her subsequent output, it pressive and representative of sexual and politi- forces its audience to reflect on the act of seeing cal disenfranchisement or it is a sexualised and and to wonder: just who is looking at whom? eroticised object. It is a symbol of the denial of the coloniser’s right to look. It blocks that right, and Jananne Al-Ani’s solo exhibition at Darat Al- therefore places the veiled woman in a privileged Funun runs from 18 May−22 July. For more position: she can see you, but you can’t see her.” information visit www.daratalfunun.org 141
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