Excavators

After tackling the fetishisation of the female body in 19th-century Western orientalist art, Jananne Al-Ani shifted her focus towards the representation of Middle Eastern landscapes, taking the 1991 Gulf War as a starting point – the first major conflict in which the view from the air dominated media representations of modern warfare. In this research-based body of works, which includes film, video and photography, Al-Ani explores the impact of aerial surveillance and military technologies on the representation of territory and the ways in which aerial perspective allows for the disappearance of the physical body in landscapes affected by conflict. Offering to take a critical standpoint on contemporary representations of contested territories, she is keen to debunk the Western-centred orientalist imagery that depicts the Middle-Eastern landscape as uninhabited, devoid of history and signs of civilisation.

In her single-channel video piece titled "Excavators", Jananne Al-Ani shows from a bird’s eye view a colony of industrious ants busy building their nest in the sand. The work is part of a larger ensemble titled "The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People". Drawing her inspiration from Paul Virilio’s "The Aesthetics of Disappearance" (1980), and one of the most enduring and contested mythologies of the early Zionist movement, that of Palestine being “a land without a people for a people without a land”, this project explores the language of cartography and images of aerial surveillance, while attempting to repopulate the landscapes they depict as barren and unoccupied. "Excavators" also plays on Al-Ani’s interest in the ambiguities of scale that the aerial perspective offers and provides the viewer with a representation that contradicts the usual depiction of the desert – it replicates the point of view of a fighter plane or drone while drawing parallels between human and non-human activity in the landscape that could be overlooked or go unnoticed.