Jananne Al-Ani

Private Collection, London

London National Portrait Gallery; Bath, The Royal Photographic Society; Edinburgh, Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Birmingham, The Midlands Art Centre, The John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award 96, October 1996 - April 1997, n.p. illustrated (another example exhibited)
London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Attitude: A History of Posing, October 2000 - March 2001, n.p., (another example exhibited) 
Prato, Dryphoto Arte Contemporanea; Toscana Fotografia: Identita Culturali, October 2002, pp. 20-21 (another example exhibited) 
Arles, Musée Reattu, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, 2002, n.p. illustrated (another example exhibited)
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; Lyon, Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de Lyon, Harem Fantasies and the New Scheherazades, February 2003 - January 2004, pp. 4, 26 illustrated (another example exhibited)
Frankfurt, Fotografie Forum, Women by Women, October - November 2004, p. 10, illustrated (another example exhibited)
Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe; Seville, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Regards des Photographes Arabes Contemporains, November 2005 - June 2006, pp. 21-24 illustrated (another example exhibited)
Washington D.C., The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Facing East: Portraits from Asia, July - September 2006, n.p., illustrated (another example exhibited)
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Without Boundaries: Seventeen Ways of Looking, February - May 2006, pp. 19, 60 [pl. 23, 24], (another example exhibited)

Philip Mattar and Thomson Gale, Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Detroit, 1996, n.p., illustrated 
Val Williams and Linda Fredericks, Modern Narrative, Detroit, 1997, p. 23, illustrated
Thomas Lawton and Thomas W. Lentz. Anniversary Acquisitions for the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., 1998, n.p., illustrated
Fran Lloyd, Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogue of the Present, London, 1999, p. 155, illustrated 
David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros, Veil: Veiling Representation and Contemporary Art, InIVA/Modern Art, Oxford, 2003, pp. 44-45, illustrated 
Christine Tohme and Mona Abu Rayyan, Home Works, Beirut, 2003, n.p., illustrated
Steven Bode, et. al., Jananne Al-Ani, London, 2005, p. 29, illustrated
Rose Issa and Michket Krifa, Arab Photography Now, London, 2011, pp. 22-23, illustrated

This work is in very good condition. There is a stable faint and stable 5cm crack to the upper right corner of the glass. The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate.
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"I decided to try and make a piece of work that said something about this idea - that costume or dress can represent an entire group of people or culture. In much of my work, I use my family as the 'performers'. One of the reasons I use them, particularly in the context of my ideas about anthropological photography, relates to the fact that my mother is Irish and my father Iraqi. So the family embodies a kind of cultural mixing which I wanted to preserve in this work, an ambiguity and sense of unfixed identity that reflects, to some extent, the methods of the Orientalist painters who often used European models dressed up as 'Oriental' women. I wanted to use models who represented various stages of Arab-ness or Muslim-ness or European-ness. In the first image, the women appear in 'ordinary' Western dress and in the second image, by placing apparently oriental costumes on them; the viewer begins to interpret the identity of the women quite differently. The costumes themselves are part reality and part fiction. Some of them are 'genuine' while others were bought from tourist shops in the Middle East, so they represent a kind of fictional 'Oriental' dress." (The artist cited in: Christine Tohme and Mona Abu Rayyan. Eds.; Ashkal Alwan, Home Works: The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Beirut, 2002. n.p.)