Vetera Novis Augere | Gallery Isabelle

Iraqi photographer Latif Al Ani (b. 1932, Karbala) presents Vetera novis augere - ‘augment the old with the new’ bringing attention to the themes of Architecture, Landscape, Modernity as well as Daily Life and Portrait photography. Latif Al Ani captured, mostly in black and white, the transformations in urban and rural Iraqi society, offering a unique gaze and testimony of the transitional and pivotal moment of the late 50s and early 60s in Iraq.
With a career spanning the late 1950s to the late 1970s, a tumultuous time in global history documented elsewhere by fellow photographers Li Zhensheng in China, David Goldblatt in South Africa, or Ernest Cole in the USA, Latif Al Ani is today considered the founding father of Iraqi Photography. During these two decades, the photographer produced an extensive and invaluable archive and document of a shifting socio-political, economical and cultural landscape in Iraq. These traces of Iraq's cosmopolitan Golden Age are now lost or no longer exist.
“My own archive is a small comfort in the face of this.”

- Latif Al Ani in his eponymous monograph, published by Hatje Cantz, 2017
Architecture
"Of the twenty-nine photographs on view in “Vetera Novis Augere (Augment the old with the new),” all but one are black-and-white. Alongside aerial photographs of mosques and railways commissioned by the Iraqi Petroleum Company in the 1950s, images of the capital taken in the early 1960s evoke years of flashy cosmopolitism. The newly established Iraqi Republic was flush with oil money, and Al Ani illustrates this wealth with sleek cars seething down the city streets, in living rooms replete with Bauhaus furniture and floating marble staircases. Most compelling are the photographs of women taken during Abd al- Karīm Qāsim’s liberal prime ministership. In Music lesson, School of Music, Baghdad, 1960, a female student cradles an accordion with an expression of fierce concentration, while the woman in cat-eye sunglasses and posed against a sedan in Portrait of an Iraqi lady, Baghdad, 1961, appears formidable and footloose at once."

Izabella Scott, Latif Al Ani at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Art Forum International, 2020
Portrait
"It is tempting to read Al Ani’s pictures as treatises on the transitory nature of any cultural epoch. He stopped shooting in 1979, when Saddam Hussein’s brutal ascent and the ensuing war with Iran made it difficult to photograph in public. Much of his archive was lost in 2003, during the US invasion. What the Arab Image Foundation has managed to protect of his oeuvre provides a rare window onto a culture since suppressed by violence, US-led and otherwise."

Isabella Scott, Latif Al Ani at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Art Forum International, 2020
Modernity
Majlis Talks | Latif Al Ani in conversation with Tamara Abdul Hadi

Two generations of Iraqi photographers in dialogue, as Latif Al Ani (n. 1932, Karbala) speaks with Iraqi-Canadian photographer Tamara Abdul Hadi on the occasion of Al Ani’s solo exhibition at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde (18 November - 28 December 2019). The talk will provide further insight into Al Ani’s widely celebrated documentary archive capturing the transformation in urban and rural Iraqi society of the 1950s and 1960s, offering a unique gaze and testimony of this transitional and pivotal moment in the country’s history. The talk is translated by Maryam Wissam Al Dabbagh of Rouya Consultancy.
"The most important project I managed to do was preserve my personal archive despite the conditions of the country. The archive at The Ministry of Culture that I created and built over the years was lost, looted, destroyed in 2003. This is deeply painful. I know how they took it, drawer by drawer, thousands of negatives: journalistic, artistic, daily life, public figures, historical sites, everything."

- Latif Al Ani in his eponymous monograph, published by Hatje Cantz, 2017
Nature and Landscape
The work of Latif Al Ani (b. 1932) has been presented in many group exhibitions including the National Pavilion of Iraq, organized by the Ruya Foundation and curated by Philippe Van Cauteren, at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) that toured to S.M.A.K. (Museum for Contemporary Art), Ghent (2016) and the Erbil Citadel, Iraq (2017), as well as Bagdad Mon Amour at Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2018) curated by Morad Montazami. An important survey exhibition curated by Hoor Al Qasimi entitled Latif Al Ani: Through the Lens 1953 – 1979, was presented at Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018), while he also participated in Crude, the inaugural exhibition of Jameel Arts Centre, UAE (2019), curated by Murtaza Vali. Al Ani’s first eponymous monograph, published in 2017 by Hannibal Publishing (and Hatje Cantz), won the prestigious 2017 Historical Books Award at Rencontres d’Arles. Al Ani is also the subject of a documentary dedicated to his unique visual archive of Iraq during the 1950s through the 1970s, produced by Iraqi film director Sahim Omar Khalifa and Belgian filmmaker Jurgen Buedts entitled Iraq Invisible Beauty. In 2015, Al Ani became a Prince Claus Laureate.
Latif Al Ani | Vetera Novis Auguere | Press Release

Read the exhibition reviews in Art Forum| Gulf News

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