My name is Jananne Al-Ani and Im an artist
I was born in 1966 in the north of Iraq
in a town called Kirkuk
and I left Iraq in 1980 and moved to Britain
We left just as tensions were rising
and very soon after we left, the Iran-Iraq war started
My practice moves between the photographic
and moving image,
and quite a lot of the work is actually about that,
is about the relationship between the still
and the moving image
Shadow Sites II is made exclusively from photographs
so although its a film, there is no moving image element
to it
So, the photographs that were looking at
were actually taken from the air over the landscape
of the Middle East
and the sites that appear in the film range
from ancient, prehistoric settlements,
through to Roman sites, Nabatean sites, Islamic sites
"Shadow site" is a term Ive borrowed
from aerial archeology,
and aerial archeology
is a discipline only really developed,
just after the Second World War
And a shadow site is one which can only
be seen from the air
and when the sun is very low in the sky,
so either very early in the morning
or late in the afternoon
The landscape can kind of hold an image like that
which most times is invisible to us
but only these kind of magical moments at dawn or dusk
when it would appear,
if you were in the right position to see it
Another kind of overriding, um, preoccupation I have
is with the 91 Gulf War
The Desert Storm campaign
Its partly because it was such a kind of watershed
in the way in which,
war was represented in terms of the general mass media
Looking at somewhere
that I was familiar with from the outside,
seeing this conflict unfolding through the media
in the West,
here in Britain,
was a really important moment for me
It was the first time we saw the footage that was being
recorded by the fighter pilots
who were actually dropping the weapons
Now, after the 91 Gulf War and on,
the image that we receive as civilians of conflict
is almost exclusively aerial
and the effect of that, the effect
that it has on us as viewers
who are consuming the images
is to give us the impression
or to kind of mislead us into believing somehow
that theres nothere are no bodies on the ground
This moment in 91 of seeing the landscape
of what was Iraq then and Kuwait,
being represented in what was so explicitly
this Orientalist view
that the desert is
a big, beautiful, unoccupied, available space,
you know, a space onto which any kind of fantasy
can be projected
So the sites that appear in the film cover
a very wide ranging historic period,
and what I was interested in doing
was to show the way in which this landscape had been
occupied
over millennia by different tribes effectively,
but the important fact was that it had always
been occupied
So Shadow Sites II what it is doing, of course,
is kind of replicating the idea of the drone,
for example,
you know, locking onto a site
We transition from one photograph to the next
through this kind of zooming and then dissolving
and so the way
that the film is built is on these kind of iconic,
maybeyou describe as kind of iconic geometric shapes
But obviously the other thing
it did was it disappeared all the bodies
So the abstraction-
its kind of double-edged