Lamya Gargash was born in 1982 in Dubai, U.A.E. She earned a B.S. in visual communication from the American University of Sharjah, U.A.E., in 2004 and a M.A. in communication design from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London, in 2007. She lives and works in Dubai.
Concerned with the relics of an ever self-renewing architecture, Gargash documents the forgotten spaces in public and private realms in Emirati society. Throughout her career, she has won a number of awards for her work in film and photography. At the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), her series Familial, which documents every one-star hotel in the U.A.E., was featured in the U.A.E.’s first Venice Biennale exhibition, It’s Not You, It’s Me. In 2004 she received first prize in the Emirates Film Competition, as well as a Special Recognition award in Dubai Media City’s Ibda’a Media Students Awards for her movie Wet Tiles. Her first artist book, Presence (Dubai: The Third Line, 2006), is a photographic series documenting recently vacated houses and structures in the U.A.E. that have been abandoned or left for demolition.
Gargash’s work has been included in several group exhibitions and film festivals, including I Exist (in Some Way) (2013), The Bluecoat, LOOK/13 Liverpool International Photography Festival; A Light unto the Nations (2007), Jacobs Lounge Visual Arts Space at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre, Toronto; the 2006 Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland; the 2005 Osaka Asian Film Festival, Japan; and Arab film festivals in Amsterdam and Paris in 2004, as well as within the U.A.E. Her series Presence was presented in solo shows at Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Cologne, in 2010 and Galleria Marabini, Bologna, Italy, in 2011. Another series, Through the Looking Glass, was exhibited in a solo exhibition at The Third Line, Dubai, in 2012.
