Amani Al Shaali: Digital Drama
Negotiating ruin and reward
Amani Al Shaali, Blue Skies are Calling from the series Snuffed Hope; Rekindled (2015). Courtesy of the artist.
With text by Rajesh Punj, art critic.
Born and based in Ajman, Amani Al Shaali came to photography at thirteen, when the camera captured her curiosity. Grounded by an absorbing culture and brilliant climate, Al Shaali has acquired an eye for seeing everything anew by creating a fanciful world in which the figure appears to have been affected by a landscape that serves as the image’s aesthetic skin. Critically, it is rewarding to watch the young photographer’s works unfold, as though a series of animated skills. She creates a narrative for a new kind of photography, in which the individual is as much antagonized as s/he is animated by natural elements. Al Shaali’s playfulness comes from her imaginative use of digital collage to conjure up scenes of heightened drama.
Concentrating on Al Shaali’s series Snuffed Hope; Rekindled and Tribulations of a Depressive, one comes to understand how she uses imagery to navigate her way through the purpose and process of picture making. She creates a situation that could easily double as the stage set for a piece of modern theatre or a seminal scene from a film. One begins to to see in Al Shaali’s fanciful images a plot that requires the ability to look outside of the frame, beyond the captured moment and into an unfolding fiction of her making. Such qualities successfully demonstrate the artist’s ability to use imagery and digital collage to create visually impressive chronicles of the lives of her individuals.
Al Shaali’s strengths lie in her will to communicate a cannon of ideas that deal in the sensibilities of young women who are negotiating the ruin and reward of their lives. And instead of seeing photography as an opportunity to capture reality and to represent it as real, Al Shaali appears to want to use the photograph as the basis for a new set of fables, in a county and continent enriched by a history of cultural preservation, while allowing the image to become a more substantial situation as a story. Such bravery sets Al Shaali apart as both photographer and storyteller.
Examples of heightened drama in her works lie in images such as In the Mourning (2016). An incredibly affecting work in which the central figure appears to be retreating from the world by resting on a makeshift bed of horizontal tree trunks that enhance the dominant background, which rises up as an impenetrable wall. In We Waiting Too Long (2016), possibly the most striking of all of the works, a figure is bent double on a bench with a slither of leaves pressed into her as though a dagger driven into her back, as though the protracting roots of a tree, a scene explained by Al Shaali as ‘waiting in the place we desperately wanted to get away from’. There are images that highlight the loneliness of the individual, as s/he surrenders and eventually succumbs to the landscape.
By fashioning an image that reads as a melancholic song, Al Shaali emphatically creates a scene of figures at their most vulnerable, perhaps a critique of a growing emotional condition in our generation. This idea is further enhanced by Al Shaali’s use of turbulent clouds, deserts and open oceans, which all fall within the theme of her digital drama. We see more of this in Blue Skies are Calling (2016), where a lone figure is thrust back and forth in a contoured pose, as though ready to leap into the open skies that are just beyond her reach; and Letters to the Dead (2016), in which the central character sites at the edge of the harbor wall facing the open ocean, Al Shaali’s photographs read as choreographed scenes that penetrate us deeply.