(HI)STORY

Since the mid-1990s, Jananne Al-Ani (born 1966 in Kirkuk, Iraq) has built up a body of work comprising video and photographic pieces that consistently revolve around narrative, history and storytelling, and frequently scrutinise Western representations of the Middle East. Regular figures in her works are her mother, her three sisters and herself. Although the fact that the women are related is never explicitly stated, their striking resemblance and unmistakable familiarity are a recurring motif in Al-Ani’s work. In response to the clichéd, exotic portrayal of women in Orientalist photography and painting of the late 19th century, the artist employs the motif of the veil in her own photographic works to counter Western prejudices regarding Middle Eastern society. examining the symbolic use of the veil, she marks it as an interface between public and private space; she contrasts the physically visible with the world of fantasy that opens up as soon as something is hidden from view. The way in which Al-Ani teases the viewer of her art with the truth also has something of a veiling quality. A Loving Man (1996–1999) consists of several monitors arranged in a tight circle, on which a clearly intimate conversation can be overheard about a man whom all five women seem to know well; yet the deliberately vague comments are entirely comprehensible to the audience. Building on a play on words—an existing structure—the work also explores the idea of communication. In this work, as in the more recent video installation A Visit (2004), Al-Ani disrupts the narrative flow through superimposition and dramatisation, causing the truth to become blurred and creating a complex sense of ambiguity that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, as the full picture is never revealed. Furthermore, A Visit powerfully explores the difficulties of family relationships and the consequences of war for people.

Tracey Moffatt (born in Brisbane in 1960) uses sketches, storyboards, performers and sets to create carefully constructed films and photographic works that explore modern Australia against the backdrop of the artist’s personal background as a half-Aboriginal woman with white adoptive parents. For her work, which draws on themes such as the Australian outback, sporting competitions or the Victorian-era fantasies fuelled by colonial conquests, Moffatt draws on a vast repertoire of Australian imagery. These include the solitude of the hinterland, the beauty and tedium of the desert, and the ancient yet simultaneously brand-new nature inherent in the mixing of races and cultures. Moffatt takes her personal experiences as a starting point, yet also speaks of the stories of others, demonstrating that the longing for a home – a personal myth that is constantly rewritten and interwoven with fantasies and fiction – is of greater significance than the home itself. Although her photographs and films refer to reality, they are filtered and mediated through cinematic and televisual images, and thus represent our collective history or the history of the human imagination. Laudanum (1998), a series of photogravures, reveals the darker side of Moffatt’s work: dreams or visions, supposedly induced by the opium tincture that gave the work its name, mixed with a vague atmosphere of colonial decadence, conjure up all manner of fantasies. In the more recent photo series Adventure (2004), Moffatt uses garishly coloured computer-generated backgrounds against which actors in caricatured roles appear, to tell a fragmentary story about modern Australia.

Adriana Varejão (Rio de Janeiro, b. 1964) sheds new light on Brazil’s colonial history: she examines the social consequences of colonisation, the appropriation of artistic conventions from the ‘Old World’ and their fusion with indigenous styles, as well as the position of Brazilian artists within this legacy. Varejão’s paintings from the early 1990s depict naive scenes of colonial oppression, images of severed limbs, or trompe-l’oeil backgrounds featuring Portuguese tiles. Other works combine Baroque iconography and depictions of martyrdom with imitations of tattooed skin – a cultural practice which the artist associates with the printing of canvas.

In the mid-1990s, Varejão turned to a reference from art history: she took painting beyond the two-dimensional plane and created ‘sculptural paintings’ that literally extended the canvas into the viewer’s space. Works such as Green Tilework in Live Flesh (2000) – in which the finished painting was slit open and the slits filled with polyurethane, reminiscent of entrails in both form and colour – experiment with the notion of the canvas as a physical entity. In her most recent work, a series of semi-abstract ‘sauna’ paintings, including Parede con Incisão a la Fontana (2002), Varejão has once again liberated the canvas from its plasticity. The precise depictions of tile structures refer less to a specifically Brazilian past than to a general history of places of torture. The marriage of figuration and geometry, however, also transforms them into timeless environments that create the illusion of an inner labyrinth.

Richard Wentworth (Samoa, b. 1947), a key figure in British art, challenges conventional notions of sculpture through his works. Wentworth finds the material for his works in everyday life – objects and ideas that he places in new and surprising contexts. Whether he uses his camera to capture situations that would escape the untrained eye, or combines, alters or manipulates found objects such as dictionaries, sweet wrappers, books, plates and buckets – Wentworth always conveys to the viewer a new awareness of the everyday and opens up unexpected perspectives on the thousand small gestures that make up our world. Wentworth is interested in the social history of humankind, in how we use certain things – such as language – as an interface between ourselves and the world, in order to understand it or to leave our ‘mark’ upon it. By focusing on the everyday, the incidental and the inconspicuous rather than on monuments and earth-shattering events, Wentworth writes an alternative history of human consciousness.

Both the installation *False Ceiling* (1995) and *Twenty Seven Minutes, Twenty Two Nouns, Seven Adjectives* (1999) – one of several sculptures made from dictionaries and rubbish found on the streets of London – illustrate that words are nothing more than another kind of readymade, whose history we ourselves enrich with every utterance. The ceramic floor installation Spread (1997) draws on one of the most fundamental elements of social history: the installation is functional and – through its ornamentation – simultaneously individualised; it symbolises the way in which humans continually rediscover the world, through the addition and subtraction of meaning, a constant coming and going.

Curator: Felicity Lunn