The Circle is an immersive sound and image installation about displaced individuals and communities within Iraq made between 2013-2016. It is based on an innovative mixture of documentary photography, video testimonies and location sound recordings recorded in Iraq over several years.  This work was made in collaboration with documentary photographer Agata Skowronek.

Since the invasion in 2003 we had felt strongly that Western media representations of Iraq had failed to show the impact violence was having on people’s everyday lives. The words of ordinary Iraqis were rarely heard over the clamour of political posturing, military campaigns and acts of terrorism. Iraq had been reduced to a body count with little meaning attached to the lives lost. To counter this we travelled across Iraq, interviewed and photographed a wide variety of different people and communities. We looked for ipeoplewhose stories exemplified the situation of the many who have fled from one part of the country to another. We saw how the process of being displaced had imposed a ceaseless uncertainty on lives of the people we met. For this reason we wanted to create a circular form to our work that would simultaneously repeat and alter over time. To do this we created different looping videos alongside a separate audio loop of a different duration. Over time image and sound drift apart - producing fresh interactions between sound and image with every cycle.

These are a selection of my portraits of people we interviewed and met which were exhibited as part of installation.