Iraq rediscovered; photography in Art Basel’s online viewing rooms
Shafaq News/ Few people had heard of Latif Al Ani until the Venice Biennale of 2015. But that summer, visitors to the Iraqi presentation in the elegant piano nobile of the Ca’ Dandolo, overlooking the Grand Canal, found a series of black and white images of a country strikingly different from the battle-riven Iraq of recent years.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Al Ani trained his cameras on a cosmopolitan society where trends and traditions, ethnicities and religions, seemed to mingle successfully. In Al Ani’s pictures, some taken professionally on behalf of the national petroleum company and the ministry of information, others personally, young Iraqi women Hula-Hoop in short white shorts, shepherds drive their flocks along newly tarmacked roads and freshly made suspension bridges glitter in the sun. He went up in light aircraft to take the first aerial shots of Iraq — the method as modern as the imagery — and professed to be the only person in the country who knew how to develop color film.
And then he stopped. In absolute terms, Saddam Hussein had imposed a ban on taking photographs in public, but Al Ani, who had even accompanied Hussein to Paris as his official photographer, also lost faith as he saw his country falling apart, including when the Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1980. “I never thought,” he later said, “that Iraq would arrive at where it is today.” In 2003, much of his archive was destroyed in the American invasion.
Happily, however, some of Al Ani’s personal collection found its way to the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut — an organization dedicated to tracking down and saving photography from the Middle East and north Africa — and has since come to the attention of Isabelle van den Eynde, a Dubai-based gallerist. She has chosen to show a selection next week, as a participant in Portals, Art Basel’s first curator-led online viewing rooms, which are accessible for VIPs from June 16 and for the general public from the day after.
The curators of Portals “gave us a brief about shifting times and the disconnected realities which have emerged from the events of the last year — the pandemic, social upheaval,” says Van Den Eynde, “and this is exactly what Al Ani is talking about. As he emphasizes the natural beauty and elegance of his Iraq, you can’t help but think about what happened next.”
The art world is one of cycles, and the larger presence of photography at Art Basel is a perhaps a reflection of our times. A fair with an exclusively online format favors certain media, and photographic imagery translates well on the screen; sculpture not so much. Van Den Eynde is one of a number of galleries to bring monographic photography shows to their online rooms in response to the Portals agenda, with artists from high-profile Americans such as Catherine Opie and William Eggleston to lesser-known, younger names.
Source: FT
