Jananne Al-Ani Aerial III, Production Still from the film Shadow Sites II

cm 183 x 232

Jananne Al-Ani works in photography, cinema, and video, producing bodies of work that explore conflict, loss, and displacement. Shadow Sites II consists of a series of aerial views that are in part meant to show that the desert, which is often considered to be unoccupied, is in actual fact occupied. The title of the video recalls a phenomenon that is familiar to archeologists: when the sun is at its lowest, the shadows make visible the remains of the settlements that would otherwise not be visible. Although Al-Ani’s aim is to contrast the mythology of the emptiness of the desert, which appears in sources that range from the Orientalist literature of the nineteenth century to the films aired during the first Gulf War, showing bombs falling on spaces that are apparently uninhabited, the scale of the landscapes is hard to interpret. The project, presented at MAXXI as part of the exhibition Please Come Back. The World as Prison? – curated by Hou Hanru and Luigia Lonardelli (February 9, 2017-May 28, 2017) – in its single-channel version, joins the collections as a new photographic print made from a video still.

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Acquisition

Photography