The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

29 ARTISTS Black Powder Peninsula (top: production still; below: still) 2016 Single-channel digital video, 4:28 minutes / Courtesy: The artist Born 1966, Kirkuk, Iraq Lives and works in London, United Kingdom By adopting the bird’s eye view of the fighter pilot or the cruise missile, it was possible to represent the landscape of the Middle East as a barren, unoccupied desert. 1 The films of Iraqi-born artist Jananne Al-Ani reveal the imprint of history, conflict and occupation on the landscape. We see no trace of the human body, but in the act of viewing, we become aware of our own bodies in space. The artist observes: One of the most striking effects an aerial view offers is the possibility of flattening and abstracting any standing structures, including the human body. When used in war, the privileged perspective of those in the air can reduce the visibility of the population on the ground: the image of the landscape becomes two dimensional, cartographic. 2 Al-Ani describes her latest film Black Powder Peninsula 2016 as focusing ‘on the British landscape and, by implication, Britain’s historic role in the formation of both the United States and the modern Middle East’. 3 To establish her visual language, she drew on World War One aerial reconnaissance photography and the practice of aerial archaeology, which uses the long shadows of dawn and dusk to identify ruins from altitude. Al-Ani’s earlier films convey a sense of falling to earth, recalling the perspective — in eerie slow motion — of a missile nearing its target. Black Powder Peninsula also employs an aerial perspective and bleached, sepia-toned footage, but this time, our viewpoint rises as if we are being lifted out of the landscape. The sensation is akin to an out-of-body experience: a lucid dream. The work also reveals layers in our globally connected histories, and takes its name from gunpowder, introduced into Europe and the Middle East in the thirteenth century from China. The film is a loop, an endless cycle. We rise up above sites that are key to the flow of power and resources: the frothing liquid of a waste treatment plant, buzzing electrical infrastructure, the repeating geometry of greenhouses, the skeletal beams and cell-like remains of munitions factories, and the circular imprints of defunct oil tanks and long-dilapidated stone fortifications. There is a humming tension of interconnectivity: we hear the rotor blades of a helicopter, the cry of a bird, the crackle of a radio, an intense substation buzz of electricity. All these systems connect us, feed us, turn the lights on, fuel our society. Some are the lifeblood of power, others the artefacts of past technologies. Black Powder Peninsula is an aerial journey over the artist’s present home, the United Kingdom. Film locations are sites of military, economic or industrial power — the remains of the Curtis’s and Harvey explosives factory at Cliffe, the ghostly footprint of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refinery on the Isle of Grain, and the ruins of nineteenth-century Palmerston Forts in the Medway Estuary. My interest in the representation of sites of conflict began with the ‘91 Gulf War, in which the prominent role of digital technology, aerial photography and satellite imagery created a watershed in the history of war reportage. 4 These images of war were circulated broadly across the world, and offered a disembodied view of the violence affecting life in Iraq. Al-Ani is deeply aware of the legacy of first the British Imperial, and then the American, military and economic power that shaped her life and the lives of countless others around the globe. Jananne Al-Ani’s works draw our attention to historical layers within the landscape, and Black Powder Peninsula documents the flow of power and natural resources linking us all, both throughout history and in the contemporary world. Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow Endnotes 1 Jananne Al-Ani, quoted in Charlotte Harding, ‘Reimagining war beyond its exceptionality’, British Journal of Photography , 28 October 2016, <www.bjp-online.com/2016/10/reimagining-war-beyond-its- exceptionality/>, viewed June 2018. 2 Jananne Al-Ani, quoted in ‘Disappearance of the body: An interview with Cécile Bourne Farrell’, Philosophy of Photography , vol.7, nos.1–2, 2016, p.77. 3 Al-Ani, quoted in Bourne Farrell. 4 Al-Ani, quoted in Harding. JANANNE AL-ANI