In a completely dark, closed cylindrical space, five monitors are disposed around the visitor like windows in the walls. On each screen there appears a woman's face, life-sized and at the height of the visitors' heads. Speaking in turn, these five women (the artist, her mother and her three sisters) continuously repeat the same phrases, which they complete little by little, thus constructing a narrative based on the principle of word and memory games. Each of the women speaks of her relationship with the “loving man”—Al-Ani's father—but also of love, conflict, cultural difference and separation, mixing and contrasting the private and public spheres, the personal history of their family and the political history of their country, the East and the West.

The artist's mother begins the narrative with this phrase: “A loving man, who broke my heart”. The first of her daughters repeats this phrase and adds: “A loving man, who broke my heart, he looked so young and optimistic once,” followed by the second with: “A loving man, who broke my heart, he looked so young and optimistic once, he was my hero, he was loving and he made me laugh”, and so on [1].

The extremely formal structure of the verses recited gradually brings out the personal history of the artist and her family, the narrative of the cultural split which led to the break-up of the family and its geographical separation. In order to address this theme of identity between individual desire and politico-cultural context and explore the mechanism of memory and the construction of narrative, Al-Ani asked her mother and sisters to write ten phrases about their husband/father and then used their memories to compose the text of the performance. The day of the filming, she had them memorise the text of the narrative very quickly and asked them to recite it in the form of a game which comes from the tradition of oral transmission and certain playful practices directly related to their shared past. Around the ritualised game, “each one's fragmented body fits into a movement of synchronisation permitting the emergence of the family body.” [2] The artist deliberately provoked and preserved the hesitation of the speakers in order to recreate the spontaneity of the game and emphasise the fragility of memory. This piece is one of a series created with her mother and sisters (Tell/Tale, She Said), intense emotional experiences are staged in order to establish a dialogue between present and past and East and West, but also between viewer and subject.

The form of the installation is extremely stark: all that is seen are the women's faces, with little or no make-up, superimposed on a totally black background. This presentation recalls a certain photographic tradition, but also “Beckettian” form of staging [3]. With a very personal theme, Al-Ani uses a concisely minimal formal language to avoid any pathetic effect. Her material is memory, which she models to make absence tangible.

Emilie Benoit.

[1] Full text: “A loving man, who broke my heart / he looked so young and optimistic once / he was my hero, he was loving and he made me laugh / he was in love and he made promises he couldn't keep / I am my father's daughter in so many ways / I understood his dilemma / He never joined us / He tried but did he try hard enough / Complete disbelief, frustration and deep anger / When politics, religion, war and cultures clash, it's the ordinary family life that pays the price / He wrote to me about his anguish and loneliness and of his memories of us as though we had all died / He feels deserted by us and we feel deserted by him / Regrets, my regrets, his regrets, your regrets / He's been a stranger to le for many years / he is no special person for me now / I can live my life more fully with him not near me / I have freedom from the exile . . Will he ever love me for who I am ?”

[2] Michket Krifa, “Jananne Al-Ani, Raeda Saadeh, Zineb Sedira, Le corps comme territoire”, Rencontres de la Photographie 2002 (Arles: Actes Sud), 2000, p. 72.

[3] In his film What Where (1983), Beckett uses a set-up comparable to that of A Loving Man: against a black background, three characters, seen only from the head up, question and answer one another in turn.