1982–present
Lamya Gargash
The Emirati photographer and filmmaker Lamya Gargash (b. 1982) shoots on film and prints in the darkroom. Her best-known series, “Presence”, is about the houses of Emirati families that have been emptied or are about to be. In 2009 she showed work at the Venice Biennale, in the UAE pavilion, and at the Sharjah Biennial.
Biography
In 2004 Lamya Gargash’s documentary film “Wet Tiles” won first prize at the Emirates Film Festival, along with a special jury prize, “Ibda”. She was about twenty-two and was just finishing university.
She was born in 1982 in Dubai, in the Hamriya quarter of Deira. By her own account, the camera did not interest her as a child. That changed in the university photography lab: when she entered the darkroom, as she herself put it, she “saw the world differently”. She studied visual communication at the American University of Sharjah and graduated in 2004. She then moved to the United Kingdom and in 2007 received a master’s degree in communication design from Central Saint Martins in London. Since then she has worked mainly with a film camera and prints her own work in the darkroom, preferring the analogue process to digital: in her words, it gives a photograph more depth and drama.
Her best-known series is called “Presence”. It consists of photographs of the houses of Emirati families who have already moved out or are about to: rooms with belongings left behind, traces of earlier life in empty spaces. The series was shown at the Third Line gallery in Doha in 2008, at the Brigitte Schenk gallery in Cologne in 2010 and at the Galleria Marabini in Bologna in 2012. In 2009 Gargash’s work appeared at two major venues at once. The series “Family”, photographs and a film, was shown in the UAE pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The photographs “Majlis” were exhibited at the ninth Sharjah Biennial. Solo exhibitions at the Third Line gallery in Dubai followed: “Through the Looking Glass of Perspective” in 2012 and “Athar” (“Traces”) in 2014. In 2019, at the Art Abu Dhabi fair, her work “Awakening” was part of the display “Gateway: Stories of the Past and Present”, where her neighbours in the room were objects from the collection of the Al Ain Museum. She has taken part in many group shows: exhibitions in Japan (Atami among them), Korea, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia.
Gargash’s films have been screened at film festivals in Locarno, Osaka, Amsterdam and Paris (at the festival of Arab cinema), as well as at the Dubai International Film Festival. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Barjeel Art Foundation.
Critics write that she turns small domestic details into reflections on identity and modernisation, and that reading of her photographs seems right to me: there are almost no people in them, and human presence is felt through objects.
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