The found rooms of Presence, along with their furniture, ornaments and décor, project a sincere, vulnerably human dimension. Each space exudes a feeling of loneliness and sorrow at their owner's abandonment. It is sometimes the state of deterioration that marks their lack of occupation, but in others, which were vacated perhaps just a day or two earlier, Gargash's steady, concentrated perspective captures the heavy atmosphere of desolation. While it is normal for the inhabitants of a home to become affectionately attached to its material elements and to experience sentimental feelings toward bricks and mortar, Gargash's photographs suggest that here in Dubai this condition works in reverse and that it is the apartments and buildings that are left prematurely in distress, while the previous occupants are happy to move on and let them go.
Things become 'old' or at least 'outdated' extremely quickly in a city that lacks an identifiable history of more than 50 years. Alone in its old age the Fahidi Fort is believed to be the earliest standing construction in the city and dates back to around 1799. The courtyard houses of Bastakiya where Gargash ironically exhibited her work earlier this year were built in the 19th Century, but even these buildings have been renovated with a mask of perfectly smooth wall-cladding that confuses their authenticity and brings them in line with the rebounding, replicative tone of the city.
Dubai's sudden and continuing acceleration of development, where new hotels, malls and homes appear every day, has infected its population with the constant desire for renewal. Gargash can remember the first shopping mall opening when she was seven or eight years old. In its wake and that of many other malls to follow, a style of 'conformative consumerism' exploded in the city. Family's began to trade their suddenly unfashionable homes for new modern alternatives. They would not even bother to take many of the house fittings and their possessions with them to their new abode, because these too were also already out-of-date. With no clear sense of an aesthetic, historic lineage of culture and identity to adhere to, the city's inhabitants moved on to adopt an homogenous modernist style of interior décor. In this process, a cultural leap was made that all but deleted the potential design and fashion preferences of the 80s and early 90s. While this seems to go unrecognised, or is of no concern to much of the population of Dubai, there are some who like Gargash, reveal a sense of nostalgia for a lost moment in time that can now never be.
The resulting atmosphere of non-stop change and a lack of material attachment with the past is clearly conveyed in Gargash's photographs. Fairly recent tastes in interior decoration that were formed by the post-oil-culture generation – grandiose chandeliers, co-ordinated wallpaper and upholstery, decorative tiles and early-model air conditioning units - together chart the beginning and end of a very short period in local domestic history. It is these key stylistic themes that provide the composition of many of Gargash's photographs and where her use of natural light eerily taunts the interiors, dulling the soft furnishings and gently tracing the ornamental details, rather than instilling in them a breath of fresh air, or life.
A variety of rooms are included in the Presence series, all found by Gargash in homes abandoned or about to be vacated. Certain of these have already become generic spaces with few references to their former lives, while others cling on a while longer to a scattering, or occasionally all their furnishings. A perfectly symmetrical and very decadent Majili (an Arabic sitting room) prematurely takes on the mood of a constructed museum set as Gargash's photograph predicts its coming demise. A series of lounge rooms, all complete with matching curtains, cushions and carpets, are already a dying breed. In one of these rooms the television set is turned on, the still it hosts stamping the date and location on the photograph, in expectation of a future generation's curiosity.
These 'about to be left' interiors are juxtaposed by images of neighbouring sites that were perhaps photographed only weeks or months later into their abandonment, but are already empty and run down. These scenes seem to condense time, but in fact show how quickly a space can fall into decay. In an image that focuses on what would have been a grand spiralling stairwell and in others of the same apartment building this acceleration of physical change is strikingly clear. On several floors that were functioning as a lobby and living quarters only a month or so earlier, Gargash found stacks of old loaves of bread. In the short time between being abandoned and its inevitable annihilation and redevelopment, this inner-city apartment space was being temporarily used to dry a local baker's unsold and excess bread to later feed his farm animals. In another photograph a chair sits alone, sadly looking out to sea. Its back is torn of fabric and a broken down air conditioning unit shares the same room. The subject of the work is not the unkempt objects or the empty chair, but the broken spirit and soul of a space and most specifically the absence of a person who should still be enjoying this view of the sea, sand and palm trees.
Gargash's series of photographs both depict and are conditioned by the perpetual velocity of the surrounding built environment. While she struggles to shoot certain spaces before they become obsolete, in only a year or two there may well be none left for her to discover. In the meantime her photographs are already acting as an archive of this unprecedented speed of change and in time they will be one of the few existing traces of a style and period of living that for now many are more than happy to leave behind.
Things become 'old' or at least 'outdated' extremely quickly in a city that lacks an identifiable history of more than 50 years. Alone in its old age the Fahidi Fort is believed to be the earliest standing construction in the city and dates back to around 1799. The courtyard houses of Bastakiya where Gargash ironically exhibited her work earlier this year were built in the 19th Century, but even these buildings have been renovated with a mask of perfectly smooth wall-cladding that confuses their authenticity and brings them in line with the rebounding, replicative tone of the city.
Dubai's sudden and continuing acceleration of development, where new hotels, malls and homes appear every day, has infected its population with the constant desire for renewal. Gargash can remember the first shopping mall opening when she was seven or eight years old. In its wake and that of many other malls to follow, a style of 'conformative consumerism' exploded in the city. Family's began to trade their suddenly unfashionable homes for new modern alternatives. They would not even bother to take many of the house fittings and their possessions with them to their new abode, because these too were also already out-of-date. With no clear sense of an aesthetic, historic lineage of culture and identity to adhere to, the city's inhabitants moved on to adopt an homogenous modernist style of interior décor. In this process, a cultural leap was made that all but deleted the potential design and fashion preferences of the 80s and early 90s. While this seems to go unrecognised, or is of no concern to much of the population of Dubai, there are some who like Gargash, reveal a sense of nostalgia for a lost moment in time that can now never be.
The resulting atmosphere of non-stop change and a lack of material attachment with the past is clearly conveyed in Gargash's photographs. Fairly recent tastes in interior decoration that were formed by the post-oil-culture generation – grandiose chandeliers, co-ordinated wallpaper and upholstery, decorative tiles and early-model air conditioning units - together chart the beginning and end of a very short period in local domestic history. It is these key stylistic themes that provide the composition of many of Gargash's photographs and where her use of natural light eerily taunts the interiors, dulling the soft furnishings and gently tracing the ornamental details, rather than instilling in them a breath of fresh air, or life.
A variety of rooms are included in the Presence series, all found by Gargash in homes abandoned or about to be vacated. Certain of these have already become generic spaces with few references to their former lives, while others cling on a while longer to a scattering, or occasionally all their furnishings. A perfectly symmetrical and very decadent Majili (an Arabic sitting room) prematurely takes on the mood of a constructed museum set as Gargash's photograph predicts its coming demise. A series of lounge rooms, all complete with matching curtains, cushions and carpets, are already a dying breed. In one of these rooms the television set is turned on, the still it hosts stamping the date and location on the photograph, in expectation of a future generation's curiosity.
These 'about to be left' interiors are juxtaposed by images of neighbouring sites that were perhaps photographed only weeks or months later into their abandonment, but are already empty and run down. These scenes seem to condense time, but in fact show how quickly a space can fall into decay. In an image that focuses on what would have been a grand spiralling stairwell and in others of the same apartment building this acceleration of physical change is strikingly clear. On several floors that were functioning as a lobby and living quarters only a month or so earlier, Gargash found stacks of old loaves of bread. In the short time between being abandoned and its inevitable annihilation and redevelopment, this inner-city apartment space was being temporarily used to dry a local baker's unsold and excess bread to later feed his farm animals. In another photograph a chair sits alone, sadly looking out to sea. Its back is torn of fabric and a broken down air conditioning unit shares the same room. The subject of the work is not the unkempt objects or the empty chair, but the broken spirit and soul of a space and most specifically the absence of a person who should still be enjoying this view of the sea, sand and palm trees.
Gargash's series of photographs both depict and are conditioned by the perpetual velocity of the surrounding built environment. While she struggles to shoot certain spaces before they become obsolete, in only a year or two there may well be none left for her to discover. In the meantime her photographs are already acting as an archive of this unprecedented speed of change and in time they will be one of the few existing traces of a style and period of living that for now many are more than happy to leave behind.
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