The Gulf And Other Places
Next week I get to share a new body of work, and it feels almost unusual to say that none of it involves AI. The images belong to a series called Night Moves, and a small selection will appear in the group exhibition The Gulf and Other Places: Discourses on Architecture, Temporality, Modernity, and Sustainability. The show opens on November 27 at 6:30 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute in Abu Dhabi and runs through December 12. RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/dDfEVnNh
Curated by Vania Rontini, the exhibition brings together the work of Ioannis Papavasileiou, Richard Cawood, Omair Faizullah, Moya Goosen and Chris Van Rhyn, Roberto Fabbri, Mohab Karram, Kelly Devrome, Yannis Kontos, Willem Venter, Dean Golja, Lina Ahmad, Marco Sosa, and Ilze Eklsa. A gathering of perspectives that wander across architecture, memory, and change. Some images sit quietly in the past. Others pull forward into the future. You move through the show and feel the Gulf’s shifting character under your feet.
My contribution, Night Moves, grew out of evenings spent watching the city rearrange itself. In the UAE, the heat bends the day into strange shapes, so construction often spills into the night when the air finally cools. As darkness settles, the halogen lights snap on, bright enough to wash the sand into silver. Scaffolds rise, cranes drift like slow metronomes, and half-finished towers glow as if lit from within. These scenes pulled me in. They felt like temporary theatres built for an audience of passing motorists and restless birds.
The photographs lean heavily on contrast. The obvious contrast of light and shadow, but also the stranger contrast between what stands and what is still unfolding. Each frame holds a structure caught in that suspended state where it is neither absent nor complete. Morning always brings some subtle shift. A new beam, a new silhouette, something small but enough to remind you that the skyline never stops moving. The Gulf’s cities carry this sense of constant emergence, as if their identity is drafted fresh every night and revised again before dawn.
Night Moves is a meditation on invisible labor and the machinery that builds a future while most people sleep. Progress here is made in long exposures, poured concrete, and the hum of generators. The images sit quietly and ask what this speed costs, how sustainable ambition can be in a place that grows so quickly, and who remains unseen in the glare of those industrial floodlights. There is a kind of poetry in watching a city assemble itself piece by piece, knowing the work will continue long after the camera is packed away.
For anyone unfamiliar with my practice, I am a British-born artist, designer, and educator based in Dubai. My work moves between photography and emerging technology and tends to circle around questions of identity, transformation, and truth. Some projects rely on traditional techniques, like these long-exposure nightscapes. Others use AI to push at ideas of authenticity. In my teaching, I encourage students to experiment without losing sight of concept and craft. Tools come and go, but attention and intention stay central.
More to share once the exhibition opens. For now, the work sits in that quiet space between darkness and construction dust, waiting for people to stand still long enough to notice what is changing around them
