Fouad Elkoury

The Lost Empire

April 30 – May 29, 2014

The Third Line is pleased to present The Lost Empire, Fouad Elkoury’s third solo show in Dubai, which presents the artist’s photographic journey through abandoned soviet military bases.

In a practice spanning more than four decades, Fouad’s work has come to be associated with documentary photography through lands that have experienced strife – with the landscape and architecture pockmarked with human conflict. The current body of work explores a similar topography of war.

After having decided to document abandoned soviet military bases in 2009, Fouad visited dozens of military bases in Poland, Hungary, Estonia and East Germany between 2010 and 2011. Most were aviation fields; others served separate purposes. And despite having being told there was nothing to photograph there, Fouad found the abandoned desolation far more captivating.

Deserted and invaded by nature, a force far more primal and stronger than weapons of war, the bases have become unserviceable areas of land. The utter silence and emptiness left Fouad the only protagonist in the plot, searching for abandoned stories, and his only ally was light, without which nothing could be seen.

About Fouad Elkoury

Fouad Elkoury has been at the forefront of photographic practices in Lebanon and the wider Middle East for quite some time. In 1982, he covered the Israeli invasion of Beirut and in 1984 published Beyrouth Aller-Retour, a book documenting the bomb-shocked city - a prelude to his sophomore project Beirut City Centre in 1991, and ignited a distinguished bibliography which continues to this day.

Fouad created the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation in 1997, and in 2001 introduced video into his repertoire with the film Lettres à Francine to accompany the chiaroscuro-esque photographic series Sombre, with Moving Out (2003) and Welcome to Beirut (2005) to follow. His On Love and War, a series of journal entries spanning the duration of Israel’s onslaught onto Lebanon in august 2006 was shown in Lebanon’s first National Pavilion in the Venice Biennale of 2007.

Fouad has held solo exhibitions at major institutions including Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; and 9th Gwangju, 52nd Venice and 7th Sharjah Biennials. Fouad's works are part of permanent collections as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and Solidere in Beirut.

Lamya Gargash

Traces

April 30 – May 29, 2014

The Third Line is pleased to welcome back Lamya Gargash, who will be showing her new body of work in the gallery Project Space. Lamya’s recent photographs expand upon her interventions in internal and external living spaces, seeking human presence in otherwise empty compositions.

Lamya’s practice has been concerned with the extensive study of identity and perception, and often documenting forgotten spaces in public and private realms in Emirati society. Finding herself caught in the chaos of daily life and the demands of motherhood, as well as the loss of several deaths in the family in the last three years, Traces echoes her longing for silent, stationary moments. The images showcase the artist’s heightened sensitivity towards finding beauty in the mundane.

The exhibition consists of a selection of photographs taken at various points in time, celebrating the visibly banal. These are spaces that still show signs of someone having left a mark of their presence – in effect also highlighting their absence: used plates after a family lunch, a motionless mickey mouse ride serenely staring off into nothingness, dirty drapes from Lamya’s now demolished house, and more.

As a photographer, Lamya finds that these poetic instances suggest moments of physical interaction of some sort and communicate our human-ness. They point towards the fragility of life, which strongly states the inevitability of mortality, and in the end the traces left behind are mere moments that will also fade with time.

About Lamya Gargash

Lamya Gargash graduated from the American University of Sharjah in 2004, followed by a Masters degree in Arts in Communication Design from Saint Martins in the UK in 2007.

Lamya has won a number of awards for her work in film and photography. In 2004, she received first prize in the Emirates Film Festival, as well as the Ibdaa Special Jury Award for her movie titled Wet Tiles. Lamya’s first artist book, Presence, is a photographic series which documents recently vacated houses and structures in the United Arab Emirates that have been abandoned or left for demolition.

Lamya has held solo exhibitions in Italy and UAE and has participated in various group exhibitions in Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, and France as well as within the UAE. In 2009, she participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale as the featured artist of the UAE's first ever national pavilion, and in the 9th Sharjah Biennale. In 2014, she participated in the 15th international FotoFest Biennial in Houston, USA.

Lamya lives and works in Dubai.

About The Third Line

The Third Line is a Dubai based art gallery that represents contemporary Middle Eastern artists locally, regionally and internationally. The Third Line also hosts non-profit, alternative programs to increase interest and dialogue in the region.

The Third Line also publishes books by associated artists from the region. Books published to date include Presence by photographer Lamya Gargash (2008), In Absentia by Tarek Al-Ghoussein (2009), Cosmic Geometry, an extensive monograph on Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Karen Marta (2011), and most recently the self-titled treatise Huda Lutfi about the artist’s Cairo based practice.

Represented artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Arwa Abouon, Babak Golkar, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Golnaz Fathi, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Laleh Khorramian, Lamya Gargash, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Sahand Hesamiyan, Sara Naim, Sherin Guirguis, Shirin Aliabadi, Slavs and Tatars, Sophia Al-Maria, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Youssef Nabil and Zineb Sedira.

Media Contact
Saira Ansari, PR & Media Manager
saira@thethirdline.com | +9714 3411 367