01 Photograph, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Youssef Nabil's Jananne Al-Ani, with Footnotes. #53

Youssef Nabil, B. 1972, EGYPTIAN

PORTRAIT OF JANNANE AL ANI, c. 2006

Hand-coloured gelatin silver print

38 by 25cm.; 15 by 9 7/8 in.

Private collection

Jananne Al-Ani (born 1966) is an Irish-Iraqi artist, born in Kirkuk, Iraq in 1966 to an Iraqi father and Irish mother. She studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 1997. 

Working with photography, film and video, Al-Ani has an ongoing interest in the documentary tradition, through intimate recollections and more official accounts. Her work also engages with the landscape of the Middle East, its archaeology and its visual representation.

Summarising her work Al-Ani said: "I have a longstanding interest in the representation of the body. The earliest works I exhibited were concerned with the way women's bodies have been represented throughout the history of western painting. In advance of the development of photography and film, the shifting ideals of feminine beauty were clearly mapped out in the work of artists. However, the media coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, which focused on aerial and satellite images of a depopulated, barren landscape, had a major impact on my work. What followed was a reassessment on my part of the work of Orientalist painters and the way in which fantasies about the body and the landscape of the Middle East were constructed in their works. I began to see the body itself as a contested territory and during the 90s produced a series of works that attempted to counter the European obsession with uncovering and exposing the bodies of veiled women. More on Jananne Al-Ani

Youssef Nabil (born 6 November 1972) is an Egyptian artist and photographer. Fascinated by cinema in his youth, Egyptian photographer Youssef captures the contemporary paradoxes of the Middle East through the lens of fantasy. In 2003, Nabil was awarded The Seydou Keita Prize for Portraiture from the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, Bamako, Mali and in 2005 he was honored by the International Photography Awards, Los Angeles, CA. His first film, You Never Left, was first exhibited in 2010. His work has been the subject of recent solo shows at Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, France (2012); Nathalie Obadia Gallery, Paris, France (2011); Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY (2010); Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA (2010); GALERIST, Istanbul, Turkey (2009); Villa Medici, Rome, Italy (2009); The Third Line Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2009); and Volker Diehl Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2009). More on Youssef Nabil

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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