Scenes and Types

Conference paper published by Ashkal Alwan: The Lebanese Association for Plastic Art, (eds: Christine Tohme, Mona Abu Rayyan, 2003).

On 3rd April 2002, Al-Ani presented a paper in Beirut at ‘Home Works’ a forum on identity, cultural practice and the Middle East. The forum included films screenings, performances and exhibits as well as the lecture presentations. Papers transcripts were published alongside exhibition documentation, performances and film screenings. Other contributors included Catherine David, Akram Zaatari and Tirdad Zolghadr. The book texts appeared in English and Arabic.

‘Scenes and Types’ focused on Al-Ani’s practice in relation to the research she had carried out on Orientalism in European art and photography with particular emphasis on the image of the veil in historic and contemporary artworks. It directly referred to early photographs and postcards produced for consumption by the growing European market to suggest ethnographic variety as part of a broad and benign anthropological agenda. The paper raised issues of how meaning is constructed and determined through the visual arts in any given environment and what structures of identification can be adopted or dismissed in order to create meaning for audiences in the Middle Eastern and Western contexts simultaneously.

In addition to her own practice-based research, Al-Ani presented the work of artists included in ‘Veil’, a touring exhibition that was organised by the Institute of International Visual Arts and co-curated by Al-Ani. It included photographs from one of the most significant bodies of work on the veil by the French psychoanalyst Gaëtan de Clérambault and a selection of portraits of Algerian women taken by Marc Geranger while working as a military photographer during the final years of the French Occupation. Part of Al-Ani’s interest in this subject is the differences in the gaze of the photographer’s and their subjects when the veil is removed.

Jananne Al-Ani
Current Research
'The Aesthetics of Disappearance; A Land Without People', this engages with the disappearance of the body in contested and highly charged landscapes in the Middle East.

• http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/jana...
• http://www.janannealani.net/
• http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/60948.htm
• http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/60949.htm
• http://www.ti3.org.uk/jananne.htm
• http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/60950.htm
• http://www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/60951.htm
• http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitio...