Art & Photography: Jamal Penjweny

Saturday 15 March 2014

Jamal Penjweny - Ikon

Jamal Panjweny, from Iraq is Flying, (2006-10)

Jamal Penjweny: Saddam is Here is at Ikon until 21 April 2014.

Jamal Penjweny is an Iraqi-Kurdish photographer and film-maker who has produced remarkable work with very limited resources - supporting himself by working as a shepherd and running a café.

This exhibition comprises 3 series of photographs and 2 impressive and affecting films which, I believe, were made using a mobile 'phone.

The photographic series are Saddam is Here, Irag is Flying and Without Soul.

Saddam is Here comprises images of ordinary Iraqi people, each holding a life-size picture of Saddam Hussein’s face in front of their own. As Penjweny says, “Saddam is here. Iraqi society cannot forget him even after his death because some of us still love him and the rest are still afraid of him ... His shadow is still following Iraqi society everywhere.”

Panjweny was born during the Iran‑Iraq conflict in 1981: "War has always been part of my life... Through my photos I try to erase the idea of war." In Iraq is Flying (2006–2010) he does just that: Panjweny got his subjects to 'leap for joy' and created a (literally) uplifting collective portrait of ordinary people displaying innocent joy.

Personally, I found the most intiguing and disturbing set of photographs to be Without Soul, in which a red line is drawn across the neck of every living person and creature in the photographs. Panjweny says "As a child I would often draw human figures, landscapes, animals and tanks… But at home I was told that it is not a right thing to make images of living creatures as it is a work of God, not of the human being. It is so because the one who gives the shape of the being is obliged to give it a soul in the next life. However, by drawing a line against the neck of the represented one can announce to God that he invalidates the image and is not claiming a position of the creator." For me, however, the images simply spoke powerfully of cruel and arbitrary execution and the innocent victims of war.

Photographs can sometimes give up all their information too quickly; the films, here, were, I thought, more powerful. One documents a market stall recycling Kalashnikovs which, as Laura Cumming puts it, "dangle like dead chickens from butchers' hooks". Another Life (2010) "is a film of young men smuggling alcohol between Iran and Iraq... [it] was made with a mobile phone and some superlative editing. Saddle-sore, stinking of horses, scarred from the bullets of roving border guards, exhausted but desperate to make a living and feed their families, the smugglers burn the crates to keep warm at night. One young man holds up a can of Amstel: 'For this I am shot at?'" (Laura Cumming.)

Read reviews by Laura Cumming and William Davie.
Jamal Penjweny is also featured in Welcome to Iraq at South London Gallery until 1 June 2014. This is a restaging of the exhibition originally shown as part of the National Pavilion of Iraq in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 - read a review of the Venice show in Frieze.