Jananne Al‑Ani
Iraq/United Kingdom b.1966

Black Powder Peninsula 2016
Single-channel digital video: 4:28 minutes, sound, colour, ed. 1/3 (+ A.P.)
Purchased 2022 with funds from Tim Fairfax AC through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation

Via a slowly rising aerial perspective, Jananne Al-Ani weaves together industrial sites from south-east England in intersecting geometries. Referencing early military photography, she focuses on the connected systems supporting our lives: a waste treatment plant, electrical infrastructure and greenhouses; as well as the ruins of earlier facilities, including defunct oil tanks and the thick blast-proof walls of munitions factories.

‘In war, the privileged perspective of those in the air can reduce the visibility of the population on the ground. The landscape becomes two-dimensional, cartographic’, says Al-Ani, who was born in Kirkuk, Iraq. ‘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’. As compared to cruise missile mounted footage in Iraq in the early 2000s, recent media coverage of the war in Ukraine has more clearly revealed the suffering of those on the ground and the terrible impact of targeting critical power and energy supply infrastructure.

Black Powder Peninsula was filmed on the Hoo Peninsula in the United Kingdom and takes its name from gunpowder processed into weapons at that location, charting patterns in the flow of trade, arms, power and natural resources over centuries.