Untitled l & ll

"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." Jananne Al-Ani, transcript of a lecture presented at Home Works Forum in Beirut, Transcript of a lecture presented at the Home Works Forum in Beirut in April 2002 and published in Christine Tohme and Mona Abu Rayyan (eds.) Ashkal Alwan/Home Works the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Beirut, 2002.

These images won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award in 1996, touring four major galleries within the UK.

Others are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum London (22.8cmx15cm A/P of Untitled l) and anothe from this edition is in the Smithsonian Institution Washington DC (edition 1/5).