Tarek Al Ghoussein

In the photographic series, Untitled (C Series) (2007), Tarek Al Ghoussein continues his exploration of themes concerned with barriers, land, longing and belonging, and focuses on ideas of transience. Al Ghoussein presents a series of medium-format photographs of blue tarpaulin – a material often used in construction – blowing in the wind in a desert setting. The bright blue tarpaulin, its ordinariness and flimsiness as it is knocked around by the wind, seems to contrast with the desert, with its vast expanse and neutral, sandy colours. The tarpaulin could be read as a commentary on the construction of cities or dwellings, which are ultimately ephemeral, leaving few traces in nature. They engender lives, as would an oasis in a desert, but do not last. As the viewer looks onto the tarpaulin site, it’s also reminiscent of the pre-Islamic poetic tradition of ‘Wukuf Aala Al Atlal’ (literally ‘standing over the ruins’ in Arabic) where every poem starts with the poet visiting the ruins of his beloved’s abandoned Bedouin dwelling as her nomadic tribe has moved on; a metaphor for ephemeral transience, whose relevance can be transposed across time and space.
 
Tarek Al Ghoussein was born in Kuwait in 1962 and is of Palestinian descent. He lives and works in Sharjah in the U.A.E. where he is Associate Professor of Photography at the American University of Sharjah, School of Architecture. He has exhibited in solo and group shows internationally since 1994. His more recent exhibitions include a retrospective of his work at the Sharjah Art Museum (2010), the UAE Pavillion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), and Tarek Al-Ghoussein, In Absentia (2009) at Gallerie Brigitte Schenk in Cologne, Germany. Al Ghoussein has spent the past 10 years considering how performance, interventions and photography can be used to explore what it means to be situated within a landscape. The anonymous spaces of the desert have served as a stage for investigating how political circumstances affect one’s relationship to a place through the propagation of myths and the creation of physical boundaries.