ART CITIES:Dubai-Tarek Al-Ghoussein
As a Kuwaiti of Palestinian origin, much of Tarek’s work deals with how his identity is shaped in a context of inaccessibility and loss. His work explores the boundaries between landscape photography, self-portraiture and performance art. He is a prominent photographer known for his works that combine elements of landscape, portrait photography and Performance.
By: Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Third Line Gallery Archive
Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s new body of work “Al Sawaber” that is on exhibition at The Third Line Gallery in Dubai documents the forgotten spaces of Al-Sawaber complex specific to a historical moment in urban development and the vestiges of lives once lived inside it. Al-Sawaber is an enormous futuristic-looking apartment complex, built in 1981in Kuwait , commissioned to provide Kuwaiti families with housing in the heart of the city. The built form provides easy horizontal circulation between the apartment blocks, and the placement of the buildings creates intimate spaces sheltered from the rest of the city. In recent years a lack of maintenance, escalating land values in the surrounding area, and gentrification have rendered Al Sawaber vulnerable to demolition. At first glance there are similarities between the scenes from Al Sawaber and Robert Polidori’s photographs of the interiors in cities like Beirut, Pripyat, Chernobyl, and New Orleans. The richly textured images of environments where decomposition has been seen in motion by catastrophe or conflict reveal the care taken by Polidori to locate and compose vivid scenes of damage and deterioration. In contrast, rather than focusing on making images that appear as painterly vignettes, Tarek considers the relationship between the non-descript apartment units and the individual expressions intended to provide the security and stability essential for “homeliness”. The photos of the objects collected from the apartments provide an intimate impression of the lives of former inhabitants. By decontextualizing the pieces and isolating them in individual photographs, Al- Ghoussein emphasizes their particular qualities. Abandonment of the objects calls into question claims of importance for those who once possessed them. Even though the pieces were discarded, they nevertheless reveal part of Al- Sawaber’s complex history.
Info: Curator: Salwa Mikdadi, The Third Line, Warehouse 78 & 80, (Exit 43 off Sheikh Zayed Road), Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, Duration: 5/11/17-20/1/18, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu: 10:00-19:00, www.thethirdline.com
