Ab-Anbar Gallery presents Landmarks, a solo exhibition by London-based Iraqi-born artist Jananne Al-Ani spanning more than two decades of photographic and moving image work and focusing on Al-Ani's longstanding interest in the disappearance of the body in highly charged and contested landscapes.
Marking the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, an event that casts a long shadow over Al-Ani's practice, Landmarks highlights preoccupations that have persisted over time and continue to reverberate throughout this distinctive body of work. From The Visit (2004), a multi-channel installation featuring intimate recollections of love and loss set against the desert landscape of the Middle East, to Black Powder Peninsula (2016), an aerial film focusing on the English landscape, including sites rich with the remains of British military, naval and industrial history.
The exhibition highlights Al-Ani’s latest film Sounds of War II (2023), combining subtly animated archival images with contemporary aerial photographs of the ghostly footprints of US airfields across rural East Anglia which were decommissioned after the end of the Second World War. While Sounds of War II draws attention to the complex geopolitical relations that led to the rise of US power and influence in the second half of the 20th Century, Landmarks invites us to recall the central role played by Britain in the formation of the modern Middle East and the many catastrophes and upheavals its communities have continued to endure to this day.
