Photographs exhibited in Sharjah and Berlin
The contemporary UAE city demonstrates an accelerated form of urbanism: spectacular, telegenic, a constructed leisure land. Everything has become aesthetic. This aestheticization of the world, Baudrillard suggests, entails a collapse of aesthetic standards. Instead of aesthetic judgment, there is a fascination with excess. This acceleration leads to its opposite, a cultural meltdown and turns social space into a fetishized abstraction. Welcome to the emerging city of the 21st century. These aerial photographs are real yet uncanny like detailed models, detached from their surrounding reality. Streets are clean, figures and cars look like models, palm trees look plastic and some detail is highlighted, all like military surveillance. The fetishzed urban image in now turning blurred and melancholic, negating its aesthetic condition and pointing to a new direction: inward, small, human, neighborhood, sensuality and a kind of defiance of unwanted reality. The city’s simulated monuments are made to look artificial, in total defiance of their reality; the city is an avatar of itself. By photographing from a helicopter using a special lens and other filters chooses what one really likes. It is like text, we read one line at a time, yet the mental picture is total and is gradually fabricated.
