'Aerial I' by Jananne Al-Ani

Shadow Sites II, 2011 Colour video, 8’38’’ Since 2007, Jananne Al-Ani has been developing a body of work titled The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People, which explores the disappearance of the body in the contested and highly charged landscapes of the Middle East. Frequently depicted as a desert, an exotic place with no history and no population, the Middle Eastern landscape has become familiar to Westerners as the blank backdrop to military action. In response to the development of aerial photography during World War I and the subsequent production of complex aerial reconnaissance and satellite navigation devices, used in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and the 2003 Gulf War, Shadow Sites I and Shadow Sites II adopt the vantage point of such missions while taking an altogether different viewpoint of the ground surveyed. The films feature land bearing traces of both natural and human activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures. Seen from above, the landscape appears abstracted, its buildings flattened and its inhabitants invisible to the human eye. Only when the sun is at its lowest point do features such as archaeological sites and settlements come to light. Much like a photographic plate, such ‘shadow sites’ map the latent images held on the surface of the earth.

film