Amanni Hassan Hollands is a British-Emirati artist concerned with frameworks of identity and time associated with domestic archives. The material and oral histories uncovered from her own family archive are leveraged to examine the complex nature of mixed ethnicity, towards a feeling of belonging. Her practice is formulated through investigative methods, and the interrogation of what can be derived from this personal archive - photographs, letters and other documentation - and via recording the narratives woven by storytellers in the family. Her interest encompasses the written, sonic and visual information captured and its reactivation through methods of display.

Using a series of practical craft methodologies such as sewing, weaving and sculpting - the significance of which relates to aspects of bedouin culture from the Persian Gulf - helps to ground the work in ideas of heritage. Sound underpins the physical work through use of field recordings, interviews, sampling and experiments with contact microphones. Hassan Hollands is interested in site specific installation, and how a range of disciplines is grouped in an exchange with one another and the space. This can take shape in the juxtaposition of traditional institutional display, with custom made structures that simulate the intimacy of fireside storytelling. She views the archive through an ecological framework, that is to say, examining archival activity as if through the ecological structure of a rainforest. In doing so she establishes a networked structure of interrelated properties, highlighting the symbiosis of archival elements and their cyclical exchange: gathering and collecting; materiality; organising and presenting; narratives and oral histories. In this way, sound, sculpture and installation work together to explore, rediscover and challenge conventions of the archive, with the aim of further disseminating its stories, but most importantly achieving a greater understanding of the family’s identity and more widely, multi-ethnicity.