Ana Nance's fables and evanescent flags

Ana Nance now lives in Madrid, but her Spanish mother gave birth to her in 1969 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She has built her reputation through a career spent largely in New York, and through numerous exhibitions and collaborations in and with numerous media in the United States, France and Spain. Her travels through more than 80 countries have allowed her to amass a voluminous and formidable photographic archive, the fruit of her personal gaze. 

The exhibition on display at Casa Árabe until the end of March focuses on a series of Arab countries such as Sudan, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Morocco and Algeria. They are photographs taken between 2012 and 2021 with which he attempts to break down the stereotypes that are often projected onto this part of the world. 

As Oliva María Rubio, the curator of the exhibition, points out, "Ana Nance makes us stop in each image and take part in her journey, which she conceives as a life experience that transforms and enriches her, as we are the result of all those places, moments and people we meet throughout life and who granted us a part of their time, their thoughts and opinions".

In these times in which technology allows us all to be observers and in a certain way artists, Ana Nance offers us her own vision, constructing a sort of fable, an allegory, that impels us to look at these countries of North and East Africa in a different way. The photographer herself confesses that reading "A Thousand and One Nights" suggested to her that she too should continue telling stories to save the richness of the diverse cultures she has been lucky enough to know, and of which these images are vestiges. And they are of disappearing worlds, which are giving way to more recent ones, but which in the end make up the reality of our infinite world. 

It is, then, a world in transformation, flags that constitute a rich and abstract metaphor. The present and the past coexist, and certainly the rural or urban landscape is more present than the people who inhabit it, but where their absence is a real presence. Ana Nance has constructed a poetic visual language in a narrative marked by the resonance of the painter she once wanted to be.

Images such as the palm tree cut down and leaning in Al-Ulla, in Saudi Arabia, the unusual snowman in Ramallah, or the walk in the street of the woman hidden by her plume of vegetables, in Egypt's Dahshur, invite active contemplation, a celebration of life and beauty. An opportunity to discover and enjoy a great photographer, a keen and great artist, an observer of a world so close to and often ignored by people living in less warm latitudes.