A Chair Between Us

By Mona Ayyash

A chair between us

I was first contacted by Gulf Photo Plus (GPP) in Feb 2020 regarding a mentorship programme they were organizing with Warehouse 421 on Mina Zayed. I was asked to discuss my practice and take part in individual critique sessions with their participants in March 2020. Then March arrived, and our emails became shorter, we were to wait to see how things go with the Covid-19 outbreak, still not yet called a pandemic at that point. The waiting, our waiting, came to an end and our emails resumed in September 2020.

At that point I was only working from home and I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at GPP: Do we present with a mask on? Will we be sitting with enough distance from each other? It turned out it was a yes for both. I spoke as loudly as possible, afraid to not be clear with a mask on. Looking back, it may have sounded like I was shouting about art. Other local artists were invited to present and then we all moved to tables arranged in a semicircle with large distances between us, ready for our one-on-ones with the participants. There was no way to talk about their projects without bringing up the pandemic, some managing fine while others had to rework their projects. At some point Finn Murray-Jones, from GPP, walked up to me with a laptop and handed me the next participant, who wasn’t able to attend in person. It was one of those moments where you remember that we really are living in a funny time.

I met Fatema Al Fardan in person that day and was drawn to her project We Dance Asynchronously on the Same Stage, which involved working with imagery and text. The work looked into her personal life and her relationship with Mina Zayed.

A Chasm Between Us is the title of one of her photographs, and it became the inspiration for the title of this text. The photograph is of her family members sitting on chairs on opposite sides, a large amount of space separating them. The large handwritten text beneath this photograph discusses displacement of people who moved to the outskirts of the city, and of the people in Mina Zayed who have or will soon be displaced. She poses the question “What happens to our narratives when our spaces are dismantled, redesigned, and reassigned function?” I laughed to myself and thought of how the pandemic has answered that for us all. Not the answer she may have been looking for, but an answer nonetheless.

A car between us

A few weeks later I was invited to attend a group critique with the participants of the programme and to continue our conversations, this time at Warehouse 421. I stopped at the border of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, waiting in line to show my negative PCR result. I raised my phone, about to take a quick photo of the line of cars waiting to enter Abu Dhabi, but the officer noticed, and I nervously lowered my phone. He didn’t say anything when I reached him, but I had shifty eyes and shoulders up to my mask-wearing ears. He accidentally touched my phone as he looked at the test results, I wished he didn’t. I wished I brought disinfectant wipes. I didn’t. “It’s ok,” I told myself, “just don’t touch your face. Move on, drive on.”

At the second critique, I engaged with Augustine Paredes and his work, Am I Driving Safely? Please Call. The project explored the lifestyle of truck drivers passing through Mina Zayed and its market. The trucks function both as modes of transport and temporary homes as they drive between destinations. Each one contains objects and stories to assemble a make-shift home at the end of their day. Some photographs are printed on fabric, hanging from above. The transparency of the fabric allows you to see multiple images at once, sensing the movement of the trucks and their drivers.

A photo between us

It’s hard to do a photo project on the deconstruction of a landmark without being accused of being too nostalgic. I recall, as an example, I once stumbled upon the demolition of Thunderbowl, a bowling alley and a shady pool hall that housed so many memories in Dubai. I was armed with my DSLR camera and quickly got out of my car to snap far too many photos of the scene. RAW files, just in case. Not yet aware that I was just encasing. I never showed the photos in fear of nostalgia. They just sat there in my memory card, then my hard drive, now buried deeper and deeper in the digital clutter.

The projects I have seen come out of the programme are careful to look at the area with curiosity, instead of in mourning. An exploration of Mina Zayed as it is preparing for its transformation, such as in the video piece Seeking by Lateefa Almazrooei. It shows quiet scenes around Mina Zayed with minimal movement, almost photographic, to illustrate the passing of time. In some of the scenes we find a red bull’s eye symbol marked on the doors or walls of the warehouses. I later learned that it's the symbol of a place ready for demolition, reminding us that these visuals are temporary, even with the attempts of slowness and inaction.

A mask between us

I returned to Warehouse 421 on February 6th for the soft exhibition opening, greeted by the artists and organizers of the show. Some were wearing two masks, I wondered if they were extra safe or extra humid in there. I tried to speak with more enthusiasm, to show that I am smiling behind my mask. They did the same. A programme has ended, a small celebration. A reason to gather. Safely, carefully, deliberately.

In the exhibition, Maryam Al Huraiz’s work echoes this quiet celebration. She created a series of still life photographs of found objects she discovered in an abandoned warehouse filled with boxes of wedding event decorations. The large boxes placed by the sides of the table, framing the still life and reminding us that they haven’t left the site. The series titled One Last Wedding interrupts the fate of the decorations to give them their last moment under the spotlight.