The Future of a Promise

The Future of a Promise was the largest Pan-Arab show of contemporary art at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. From Tunisia all the way to Saudi Arabia, this landmark exhibition brought together more than twenty-five recent works and commissions by some of the foremost artists from the Arab world.

The exhibition included Al-Ani's single screen film Shadow Sites II.

"Shadow Sites II is a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and man-made activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures. Seen from above, the landscape appears abstracted, its buildings flattened and its inhabitants invisible to the human eye. Only when the sun is at its lowest, do the features on the ground, the archaeological sites and settlements come to light. Such ‘shadow sites’ when seen from the air, map the latent images held by the landscape’s surface. Much like a photographic plate, the landscape itself holds the potential to be exposed, thereby revealing the memory of its past.

Historically, representations of the Middle Eastern landscape, from William Holman Hunt’s 1854 painting The Scapegoat to media images from the 1991 Desert Storm campaign have depicted the region as uninhabited and without sign of civilisation. Shadow Sites II recreates the aerial vantage point of such missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the land it surveys. The film burrows into the landscape as one image slowly dissolves into another, like a mineshaft tunnelling deep into a substrate of memories preserved over time. "

Statement by Sharmini Pereira in collaboration with the artist.

• http://www.thefutureofapromise.com
• http://edgeofarabia.com/exhibitions/the-...