Interview Jananne Al-Ani

Interview with Julian Ross for Sonic Acts Festival 2015, The Geologic Imagination. Born in Iraq, London-based artist Jananne Al-Ani engages with the politics of the image. In her works in photography, film and video, Al-Ani interrogates our ways of seeing by undermining the structures of scale and perspective in which visual culture is shaped. While her conceptual application is subversive, her methods are gentle, often resulting in evocations of assumptions which are quietly unsettled. In her work in the 1990s and early 2000s, her central subject was the Western portrayal of the Middle East, in particular, women and the veil. Working closely with her immediate family, her works undercut media-fuelled perceptions of ‘other’ cultures with personal narratives and playful mind-games. Shifting away from the human body as an image to the human imprint, her recent series The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People illustrates Al-Ani’s preoccupation with the ways in which history is etched into the landscape. Bold in technique yet comparatively subtle in effect, her films Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011) capture the desert landscape of the Middle East. What appears to be an uninhabitable landscape is revealed to be a home for industrial farms and abandoned military training camps. Playing with the visual codes of modern warfare, the remnants of structures spread out over the land and speak of untold histories of human activity. Presented at the 2015 edition of Sonic Acts curated under the theme of ‘The Geologic Imagination’, the two films shown together drove home the misconception of the border between nature and humanity, a theme that spanned across the works presented in the festival. Film programmer and researcher Julian Ross took the opportunity to interview Jananne Al-Ani during her visit to Sonic Acts where she presented her recent series