Summer Art exhibits

Beat the heat with a summer of art watching in Dubai. You'll be an expert before Ramadan's over Discuss this article

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Green Art Gallery

The first time you see a hand-painted photograph you can’t help but be impressed. Suddenly, a contemporary photograph has been given a patina of age, of mysticism. It hearkens back to a more decorous time when things were simpler, colours were muted and anything, however mundane, looked exciting.

So it is with Laila Muraywid’s collection Blood Deeper Than Shadows, which forms the greater part of Green Art Gallery’s summer show. The Syrian photographer also doubles as a sculptor, incorporating melting, organic resin creations into her scenes. The images incorporating sculpture are good, they equate the textures of nature with mysteriousness and sensuality. But the collection is just too passé. Women flinging themselves onto the bed in frustration, obese people wrapped in towels and even a few shots in a graveyard: Seen it all before, sadly.

Then there are Jaber Al Azmeh’s horse photographs, focusing in on the dramatic ridges of a horse’s back suggesting the rising contours of a landscape and trying to distance the image as much as possible from a horse. Again, this has been done to death before, and has been done better by other photographers who manage far more adeptly than Azmeh to evoke something ethereal about these horses. Hakim Ghazali’s textural interplay between text and a roughly hewn canvas are effective, and do stand out as the more inventive side of this collection, but, as it is, this look-back over Green Art Gallery’s past 12 months of shows falls a little flatly.

Green Art Gallery (04 344 9888) Until September 15