Art Basel OVR: Portals
Online viewing room
Curated by Magali Arriola, Christina Li and Larry Ossei-Mensah
17 - 19 June 2021
We are pleased to participate in Art Basel OVR: Portals. This first curator-led edition of Art Basel's Online Viewing Rooms focuses on artistic practices that interrogate the parameters that have shaped our contemporary condition, both through current and historical lenses. the OVR will feature seminal practice of Iraqi photographer Latif Al Ani with works from 1950 to the late 1960s that showcases two disconnected realities — one denoted, one implied. It is impossible to consider historical representations of Iraq without succumbing to contamination by the scars of conflict inflecting recent imagery. Al Ani’s practice exhibits a compelling tension between the nation’s modernist urge, an enduring archaeological legacy, and the people who inhabited a now-intriguing everyday. Yet these works are consistently countered by our contemporary conditioning to reduce and pigeonhole, to oversimplify and club into one stereotypicalpot. This tension, in turn, makes the works doubly strong: they at once excavate and confront.
