Pushing the traditionally private life of women into the public eye

Privat[ly] is an exhibition of photographs by students at Dubai Women's College and a remarkably honest look at the preoccupations of the young Emiratis.

Private[ly], at Ductac, is showing the work of first-year students at Dubai Womens College.

One evening last week, a 20-year-old Emirati named Azza Abdulaziz al Owais stood before a photograph she'd taken and explained, for maybe the 50th time that night, the meaning behind it. The picture, titled Out, featured a strikingly beautiful woman, in traditional attire, staring boldly at the camera. In the background, a group of women talked behind their hands, glaring at the subject in a disapproving way. "The girl wants to succeed, she has a goal," al Owais said, gesturing at the shot. "But her friends are jealous. They want to destroy what she has built."

When asked what the girl in the image is supposed to represent, al Owais didn't miss a beat: "The girl is me." This glimpse into rivalry is part of Private[ly], an exhibition currently being hosted by the Gallery of Light at Ductac in Dubai. The show highlights the photographs of 18 first-year communications students at Dubai Women's College, none of whom have exhibited their work in public before. The idea was to encourage these students, who range in age from late teens to early 20s, to open up about things they usually consider to be nobody's business but their own. The result is a remarkably honest, occasionally spellbinding look at the preoccupations of these young Emirati women.

The success of Private[ly] is due, in large part, to its co-curator Shammi Samano, who also taught the class from which it emerged. Samano, who has been on the faculty of Dubai Women's College for three years, spent a lot of time and mental energy trying to coax candour from the group of women she calls "my girls," most of whom generally aren't in the habit of laying bare their souls in public. "I told them, if you're not doing something that pushes boundaries, what's the point?" she said. "If it's safety you want, go into banking."

While it wasn't always easy going, Samano persevered - the class represented her last at the college (she's moving on to make films) and she sensed that there was a rich vein of material lurking beneath the surface of the girls' finely tuned public personas. "One of the things that really interests me about young women in the UAE is the divide between their public and private lives," she said. "These girls move so effortlessly, professionally even, between these two worlds. The tension is brilliant. As an artist, I find it inspirational."

Images at the exhibition touch on various themes, familiar no doubt to young women around the world. There are lamentations for lost innocence, blasts of exuberance, feelings of insignificance and the fear of violence. There is envy, vanity, rebellion and isolation. There is also anger, expressed most graphically in a shot from Hanan Ahmad al Bulooshi, which shows a woman, lost in shadow, holding a bloodied knife to her chin.

Samano was quick to point out that she doesn't believe in being gratuitously provocative, and neither is she keen to step over the line into offensiveness. Even so, she allowed that a few of the images in Private[ly] teetered on the verge of the controversial. One such piece, Reversal of Strength, an audacious expression of female empowerment, drew a good deal of attention from the audience. The piece, created by Marwa Mohamed, is a slick, atmospheric image depicting a woman wearing traditional dress reclining in a red velvet armchair, smoking a large cigar and extending a palm to a man squatting by her side. "This comes from my personality," Mohamed said of the picture. "In my country, it's usually expected that the man guides the woman. I don't need a man to guide me. I can make decisions on my own."

Far from being scandalised by the shot, however, the majority of the people attending Private[ly] seemed to enjoy it - one or two even wanted to buy it. "I was a bit surprised," Mohamed said. "I didn't know if people would get my ideas." Samano, meanwhile, was torn between pride and relief. "You know what changes things?" she said. "Success. Achieve success and all of a sudden you're not the enemy any more. Someone has to step forward and say, 'We can do this.'"