Lamya Gargash: Inside Abu Dhabi

Dubai artist investigates the cultural hubs of the capital

Lamya Gargash, Library, The Cultural Foundation, from the series Documentation of Clubs in Abu Dhabi (2015). Courtesy of Emirati Expressions, Lamya H Gargash and the Third line.

With text by Elisabeth Stoney, art historian.

In her recent suite of paragraphs, commissioned for the biannual Emirati Expressions exhibition of Emirati art, Lamya Gargash explores the world of Abu Dhabi’s social clubs and sporting associations. Her images reveal some surprises as they disclose a layer of community life, the grass roots of the cultural institutions, that is not widely known.

Working alone, without the presence of the club members, Gargash documented the club rooms and facilities of ten different associations including the Writer’s Union, the Jujitsu Federation, the UAE Football Association, the India Social and Cultural Center, the Marine Club and the Armed Forces Officers Club.

Gargash works slowly, with a heavy case of different cameras and film stocks (negative, slide film and polaroid), returning for reshoots, preferring the pace and the suspense of ‘film’, i.e. film-based photography, which she refers to as a ‘dying medium’, that she hopes nevertheless to continue working with for a few more year. She manages her final print production remotely, negotiating with European laboratories where her negatives are scanned and prints handmade to her specifications.

The photographs, always interior views, are also slow and considered. The compositions are attentive to furnishings and other details, in particular to discarded things, like an idle plastic bottle or an image on TV screen, objects that Gargash calls ‘things left behind.’ Many times it is the arrangement of tables and chairs or the formality of a majlis that suggests human presence. An image of the abandoned library of the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation suggests that some of these places too have been left behind. The complex, which was designed in the 1970s by the architectural film of Walter Gropius, was planned as the first national library—today it is threatened with demolition.

This is a recognizable assignment for the artist, whose work over 10 years has located a local approach to the modern built environment of the UAE region. Her projects have often sought out interiors of the modernist architecture associated with the wave of urban development that swept the region around the time of the ittihad, the unification of the emirates in the optimism of the 70s. But while the photograph can analyze architectural forms and reduce them to design, this has not been of interest to Gargash, whose photographs of spaces record the energies and dynamics between people and places. It has been her work, like the work of Todd Reisz and George Katodrytis, both architects, that has inspired a renewed interest in the modernist architecture of the region, an awareness that blossomed in 2014 with the exhibition created for the UAE Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale of Venice.

 A sweeping aerial view of the grandstands of the futuristic Zayed Sports Stadium, the jewel of Zayed Sports City, is a reminder of a recent past, when development meant something different.

 In 1974, with a plan to promote sports to the nation’s youth, the Abu Dhabi Town Planning Department launched the project for Sports City. Today, the large-scale sporting complex on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, a kind of Brasilia of sport, is overshadowed by the attractions of Saadiyat and Yas islands. Gargash’s camera recognizes that public works projects like Sports City and the Cultural Foundation, with their clear social focus, and no longer typical of visionary architecture—or of the investment that drives it. It seems that across her cultural club series, the nostalgia that marks each photograph is the rediscovery of the golden era of public building in the emirate.