Ayyam Gallery’s summer exhibition highlights the diversity of photography

Arab artists from across region showcase their varying styles through the photographic medium

The Lens & Light: Moments in Focus exhibition will run until August 31 in Ayyam Gallery at Alserkal Avenue. Pictured: Maximum Alert and La Strada from Lost Images 2 Series by Ammar al-Beik. Photo: AyyShow more

An engrossing, diverse photography exhibition showcasing the works of important regional artists is under way at Dubai's Ayyam Gallery.

Entitled Lens & Light: Moments in Focus, the show highlights the various facets and styles within photography and how it plays an important and comprehensive role within the history of art and, in particular, expressing nuances of the Middle Eastern experience.

“Photography immortalises moments like no other medium, moments from everyday life, whether happy, sad or hard,” Maya Samawi, director of Ayyam Gallery, tells The National.

“Photography captures instances forever, but a true photographer manipulates the camera to his advantage capturing the expressions he’s looking to share with the world. Rather than experiencing photography solely through the eyes, they capture with the heart and soul through the device.”

The exhibition features the works of Syrian filmmaker Ammar al-Beik; Iraqi conceptual artist Sama Alshaibi; French-Syrian journalist and photographer Ammar Abd Rabbo; Syrian artist Tammam Azzam; Saudi artist Huda Beydoun, Iranian contemporary photographer and visual artist Majid Koorang Beheshti, Palestinian photographer Rula Halawani; Saudi artist Faisal Samra and Syrian photographer and visual artist Nassouh Zaghlouleh.

Large-scale, mostly black-and-white photographs are thoughtfully arranged in the two spaces of the gallery at Alserkal Avenue. They capture the play between light and shadow, alongside arresting, delicately composed narratives and surreal photo-manipulated scenes. The works vary in style and are connected to each other not only through the medium but, as Samawi points out, through existential themes connected to identity.

“Something that ties the different artworks together is identity, utopia, and dystopia,” she says. “Through their work, the artists are rehashing their shared Middle Eastern identities, through photographs of their landscapes, rehashed archival images, or a shared past.”

Al Beik’s recreated images combine old archival and found photographs framed within coloured images, based on the CMYK colour model of classical antique sculptures, arranged like a photography negative strip.

His La Strada from Lost Images 2 Series depicts a passport-style portrait of a mother and child, while Maximum Alert shows a group of uniformed, unarmed soldiers with their unaffected poses and gazes as the subjects superimposed against Al Beik’s colourful frames. The collage combines varied representations of people from the past and present, obscuring our notions of history and memory.

Two of Alshaibi’s photographs from her Negative Capable Hands series, meanwhile, connect the idea of the destruction of the Earth’s bounty and its body to that of the modern human experience. Composed like film stills, one of the photographs depicts a pair of hands interacting with an open pomegranate.

Its ruby red seeds dispersed against the rich brown soil of the earth, next to a half cut pomegranate as well as another that’s fully intact. Through this beautifully composed image, Alshaibi subtly comments on the politics of the Earth’s scarce resources using metaphoric symbols.

“The photographs represent the instability and hardships the Middle East has been facing – an inescapable sorrow,” Samawi says.

“While some photographs allude to politics, like Sama’s Negative Capable Hands Series, others capture the lost beauty, what was and could have been. An example here would be Nassouh Zaghlouleh and Rula Halawani’s photographs; the two artists cover two countries that have lost their beauty, Syria and Palestine.

“On the other hand, some photographs are dystopic, representing a parallel universe, maybe what might come, or also an exaggerated representation of what happened, like Tammam’s collages and Majid Koorang Beheshti’s dystopias.”

Another striking image is Abd Rabbo’s People praying next to the Great Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It depicts worshippers in Makkah, praying outdoors from a bird's-eye view. Their elongated shadows before them on the tiled floor, there are people standing, some in motion, others in wheelchairs, some with their heads bowed, others looking above, all revealing the diversity in prayer while being connected through worship.

One of the strongest takeaways from Lens & Light: Moments in Focus is reframing the idea of what the photographic medium, which today is a highly accessible tool, is capable of. The exhibition engages the viewer through the different voices of the artists and the lithe nature of a medium that is often overlooked.

“I encourage people to come see this exhibition, because people often overlook photography as a medium, thinking they could do the same, and take the same images,” Samawi says.

“I recommend people visit and look through to see the strength of the medium and learn more about art and the different artists.”

The Lens & Light: Moments in Focus exhibition will run until August 31 in Ayyam Gallery at Alserkal Avenue.