jan 1, 1965 - PIC: Alexanderplatz Berlin
Description:
His visual chronicle, capturing the details of everyday life in Berlin, which had barely recovered from the wounds and ruins of the Second World War, paradoxically echoed the destruction in Iraq caused by repeated coups d’état (1958, 1963, etc). Al Ani, who knew so well the look and attitudes of European and American tourists in Baghdad, seems to take mischie-vous pleasure in “playing” the Iraqi tourist in Berlin. This falsely innocent and above all humorous approach seeks a delicate balance between being-elsewhere and being-here, between the celebration of a world without borders and the inadmissible dream of finding one’s homeland elsewhere than at home. Al Ani teaches us that cosmopolitanism is also the art of reading secret geometries, in coffee grounds or distant spirals, thousands of miles away. Is the fleeting resem-blance between two photographs taken four years apart – of the al-Sahra round-about in Baghdad’s Kadhimiya (1961) and of the Alexanderplatz in Berlin (1965) – accentuated because they are both taken from above? Is it the result of chance, the fluttering of the eyelids or the aesthetic homogenisation inherited from black and white photography? Or does it reveal the dynamics of pre-globalisation at play at least since the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad (Baghdadbahn)railway line in the early 20th century and known to have played a major role in the outbreak of the First World War?
Added to timeline:
Timelines Iraq & Latif al Ani
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