Camille Zakharia, a Canadian-Lebanese photographer, has documented through his work, his life’s migration from his Lebanese homeland across Europe, North America and his present home in Bahrain. Through his lens, he explores the landscapes of his journey, sometimes reconstructing them as spaces of his own memory and longing for a home, often reflecting on the people that accompanied him along the way. Most of the works in the current exhibition, selected from several series representing his time as an artist working in the Gulf since the 1990’s, are reflections on the rapid changes in both the environment and society that he has experienced in this region. They speak of massive urban development and the human response to it, the loss of traditional life styles and the quest to redefine belonging amidst massive change.

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, born in Kuwait to Palestinian exiles, spent part of his youth in the United States, Morocco, and Japan. He has worked in the United Arab Emirates for the last twenty years, where he has recorded and reflected on the massive changes taking place there. His photographs depict abandoned spaces and deteriorating buildings, and objects that are often in the process of decay and close to extinction. Al-Ghoussein examines traces of a human presence – preserving the narrative of the spaces and their former inhabitants.  At the same time, he looks at his own place within these spaces and the processes of fleetingness that they represent. He explores how identity is shaped within a context of inaccessibility and loss. The works chosen for the exhibition are selected from the series Odysseus, named for the hero of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey”. In the series, Al-Ghoussein sets out to document the 215 islands off the coast of Abu Dhabi. In his photographs, the artist is often seen interacting with the landscapes he records, sometimes creating situations full of absurdity. The process of visiting and recording the islands, often in remote locations, has been marred by bureaucracy, but Al-Ghoussein has persistently tried to return and continue documenting them, and so the story of his journey is much like that of Odysseus – about his homecoming as much as his journey.

Both artists reflect on the sense of loss and belonging through a discourse with the environments with which they interact in their works. They are both chroniclers of massive human interventions in these environments, but make no value judgements about them. These places exhibit a bizarre beauty, far removed from the romanticism with which the idea of Arabia still exists in the minds of those who only know the region from global media or fleeting visits as tourists. Within the symposium, the exhibition will create a space of discourse on the larger issues of environmental change from the perspective of two photographers who have been witnesses to monumental change in the Arabian nations of the Gulf.