Photography and Lens Based Practice: Jananne Al-Ani

Tell/Tale is a video work by Jananne Al-Ani (b. 1966, Kirkuk, Iraq), produced in 2002 as part of Identinet, a multi-platform project that explored the increasingly fragmented landscape of television and the emergence of the internet as a space for multiple, parallel identities. The project brought together four artist commissions, each combining an ongoing online presence with a short film broadcast on Channel 4.

Through intimate imagery and voice, Tell/Tale explores familial identity, memory and the relationship between personal narratives and wider histories of displacement and cultural inheritance. Al-Ani considers family as a fluid, interdependent construct, examining how memory is shaped through silence, testimony and storytelling, while connecting autobiographical experience to broader histories of cultural displacement and contested identity.

The work reflects Al-Ani’s wider engagement with voice, absence and the politics of representation. It forms part of her ongoing investigation into contested histories and landscapes, exploring how personal and collective histories are shaped by what is visible, remembered and deliberately absent.