The Grass is Green on The Other Side
Hanane El Ouardani
With the 1991 Gulf War, US soldiers brought quintessential American artifacts to Kuwait: weapons and fast food chains. Fascinated by images of McDonald’s in US military bases, Hanane El Ouardani journeys to the Gulf, intent on capturing her surroundings. But Kuwait proves challenging to navigate: mobility is limited to cars, the original fast food restaurants are inaccessible, and the remnants of the past seem scarce. In addition, as a North African woman photographer, she wrestles with a web of misogynistic judgment, occasional oversight, and skepticism.
Still, El Ouardani persistently scours Kuwait City for war remnants, discovering a card game portraying Iraqi leaders played by American soldiers. In “The Grass is Greener on The Other Side” (2023), she catches glimpses of a country veiled by futurism, detached from the ground and projected into the sky. The card game is a rupture in the veil, and a car adorned with Kuwaiti leaders’ portraits becomes a shrine to those responsible for this willful amnesia.
Despite this erasure, America’s ghost persists in Kuwait’s hypercapitalism, with shopping malls and fast-food joints, mainly employing migrant workers, serving as the nation’s agora. In Kuwait, the future is now, and migrants are building it. On “Prospects,” El Ouardani shares portraits of the hopeful men borrowed by the Gulf yet never integrated into its society, recognizing her grandfather’s life trajectory, a Moroccan guestworker in the 1960s Netherlands.
To observe Kuwait, one of the world’s hottest inhabited places, is to face the blinding blaze of its sun, a brilliance so intense it compels eyes to avert their gaze. Through these photographs, El Ouardani refuses to look away.
Hanane El Ouardani (NL, b. 1994) lives and works in Amsterdam, where she graduated from The Hague’s Royal Academy of Art in 2018. The Dutch-Moroccan photographer was born in the Netherlands with bicultural roots, and her practice reflects a recurring duality: on one hand, an unwavering desire to truly feel at home somewhere, and on the other, embracing her status as an ‘outsider’ due to the unique perspective it offers her, allowing her to keenly observe differences from a distance. In 2018, she published the photo book ‘The Skies are Blue, The Walls are Red’, a visual diary that explores the various layers of a diasporic identity. The book raises questions about representing one’s roots without feeling estranged from one’s own culture.
Drawing inspiration from clichés and contradictions, her work raises questions about identity, exotism, contradictions and social status. She dissects the layers of these themes, often starting from a personal narrative, which organically speaks to a collective spanning different cultures.
El Ouardani takes her camera to places where men are prominent in public spaces. As she actively interacts with them as subjects, she insists, “ I believe it’s crucial for the female gaze to participate in uncovering masculinity’s place in our contemporary world.” Her work has been exhibited at notable venues, including the Van Gogh Museum, Unseen Amsterdam, Foto Tallinn and Paris Photo.