Jananne Al-Ani’s photograph series Untitled, 1998 is included in the National Partners Programme exhibition My name is not Refugee at Firstsite, Colchester.
Over the past year a group of refugees and asylum seekers have worked together with Firstsite staff and Refugee Action Colchester to create an exhibition of artworks from the Arts Council Collection.
My name is not Refugee is an opportunity to see past the label of ‘refugee’ and, whilst acknowledging the conflict or trauma which may have been experienced, instead focus on the lives of the contributors before and after arriving in the UK. The exhibition reveals commonalities between visitors to the exhibition and the first-time curators, creating a greater understanding about our community, finding out what we all share and how we are all connected.
Jananne- Al-Ani is an artist, researcher and lecturer who works with photography, film and video, initially beginning her career as a painter. Her work often features members of her immediate family and explores the power of testimony and the documentary tradition, through intimate recollections of absence and loss in contrast with official accounts of historic events.
Her early photographic work explores issues of gender, politics and the representation of women within a historical narrative of colonialism, especially the fetished veiled body of Middle Eastern and North African women in Orientalist paintings and photographs, as seen in the work Untitled, 1998. Adopting the conventions of early photographic studio portraiture, the five women of Al-Ani’s family (the artist herself, her mother and her sisters) are formally posed in this group portrait, dressed in traditional Arabic and Westen clothing.