Jananne Al-Ani

Al-Ani 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.

‘The Visit’ is a two-part video installation in which repeated scenes of a mysterious figure pacing in an empty landscape are contrasted with a series of conversational exchanges between a group of young women…

The Guide and Flock form a two screen video work installed in a sea container on Whitstable’s main beach.  The films are part of a new body of work Al-Ani is developing which explores the disappearance of the body in the contested landscapes of the Middle East.

Though the work of Jananne Al-Ani is neither melodramatic nor brutal, the inevitably Greek tragedy resides in its rhythmic lament, in its darkly-clad chorus of women, in its absent, but ill-begotten ‘hero’. As the audience, we are cast between pity and fear, between empathy and anxiety. Since the mid 1990s, Al-Ani’s photographic and video portraits have been dominated by central figures of her mother, herself and her three sisters, and pervading, yet absent paternal figure…

"Untitled I & 2" (1996) are riveting photographs by Jananne Al-Ani, an artist based in London who is half-Iraqi and half-Irish. Frankly this image of five women in various stages of hijab, or veiling/and unveiling drew me like a magnet – especially the bared knees which are central to this "performance" for the camera…