Jananne Al-Ani (Artist, UK)

Jananne Al-Ani works in photography, film and video. Her early work focuses on Orientalist representations of the Middle East in Western visual culture. The Gulf War of 1991 had a profound impact on her practice, leading to a series of multi-screen video installations such as A Loving Man (1996–99) and 1001 Nights (1998), which address the fallibility of memory, the power of testimony, and the documentary tradition by bringing together intimate recollections of loss and trauma with official accounts of historic events. Recently, her work has moved out of the studio and into the landscape, and she has filmed several projects in the Middle East. Al-Ani has had solo shows at the Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2013); Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, USA (2012); Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan (2010); and Tate Britain, London, UK (2005). Group exhibitions include the Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012); Arab Express, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2012); Topographies de la Guerre, Le Bal, Paris, France (2011); and Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2006). She received the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011.

Jens Maier-Rothe (Co-Director, Beirut, Egypt)

Jens Maier-Rothe is an independent curator based between Cairo, Egypt and Berlin, Germany. He received his MFA in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, and is a fellow of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA. Together with Sarah Rifky, he is Co-Director of Beirut, a new art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo. He has realised numerous group exhibitions in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, Sweden, Taiwan and the US, and founded the curatorial research project Sonic Thinking in 2008. He has lectured and taught at universities and institutions including the School of Visual Arts, New York; Inter Arts Center, Lund University, Sweden; MASS Alexandria, Egypt; and the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy. In August 2012, he initiated, co-organised and hosted the international symposium Citizens Reporting, A Collective Memory, in Berlin, Germany.