Exhibition Opening: November 27, 2025 at 6:30PM
RSVP: https://thegulfandotherplaces.splashthat.com
The exhibition will be open to the public by appointment only until December 7, from Monday to Sunday, between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., by sending an email to abudhabiiic.segre@esteri.it
Curator : Vania Rontini
Participating Artists: loannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou, Richard Cawood, Omair Faizullah, Moya Goosen & Chris, Van Rhyn, Roberto Fabbri, Mohab Karram, Kelly Devrome, Yannis Kontos, Willem Venter, Dean Golja, Lina Ahmad, Marco Sosa, Ilze Eklsa
The influence of postmodernism and the rise of human geography and critical humanities studies has intricately linked places and landscapes with architecture, the built environment, and the lived experience within these spaces. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s “Learning from Las Vegas (1972) marks a pivotal transition to postmodern concepts of “place,” further complicating the relationships between landscape, space, place, and architecture.
Photography serves as a powerful medium for documenting architecture, urbanization, and human experience. The UAE, in particular, presents a unique yet fragile layer of modernist architecture and public spaces, primarily designed with a focus on functionality. While many of these structures have been demolished due to a second wave of urbanization, a few still stand as reminders of the city’s early period of modernization. Recently, there has been a growing call to preserve this architectural legacy amidst rapid real estate development, sparking hope for safeguarding the living history of the city.
The Gulf and Other Places seeks to explore the built environment, temporality, historicity, and historical preservation, as well as the daily spatial and transport patterns followed by people living and commuting in the UAE and beyond. The exhibition also reflects the artistic, societal, and cultural forces that shape these spaces. The participant artists address topics including urban and suburban architecture, overlooked places, residential neighborhoods, streets and alleyways, urban blocks, and construction zones.
The exhibition will illustrate sites of preservation, transition, and transformation. Some of these sites are emerging, while others lie forgotten or have been erased due to UAE’s urbanization. In both cases, the artists capture these places through their unique photographic practices. As artworks, information, or raw data, these images become historical evidence and culturally significant records. The exhibition explores the binary opposition between “this” and “other,” place and history, and re-emerging narratives. The artists create creative parallels that examine how the postmodern “place” is consumed, utilized, perceived, and experienced through photography. Consequently, the images offer viewers an opportunity to reconsider notions of the built environment, temporality, historicity, and historical preservation that are often overlooked due to stereotypical perceptions of the UAE.