Beyond Here is Nothing | Laura El-Tantawy
GPP Photo Week | Exhibition
One of the region's longest running photography festivals, GPP Photo Week champions photography as a visual medium which engages audiences in dialogue while providing unique opportunities to share nuanced perspectives and alternative histories. The core of the festival is educational, with workshops, talks and masterclasses that shape and inspire tomorrow's visual storytellers.
Each year the festival begins with an exciting evening unveiling multiple new photography exhibitions in Dubai's cultural district, Alserkal Avenue. The 2018 edition included the work of Laura El-Tantawy, exhibited in the Gulf Photo Plus gallery space. I was responsible for the selecting, curating, and producing this exhibition and others including work by Jalal Sepehr, Khalik Allah, and Osborne Macharia..
Born in England to Egyptian parents, Laura El-Tantawy lived in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the US before returning to the UK where she currently lives and works. Having spent her life moving between East and West, her work portrays an intimate and emotive visual exploration of rootlessness. Her first publication, In the Shadow of the Pyramids, shared a personal and emotionally charged perspective of the Egyptian revolution, awarded Best Photobook at the 2015 Fotobookfestival in Kassel, Germany.
Picking up where her previous book left off, Beyond Here is Nothing is equally poignant but retreats from the public sphere into a private world, where the mental burden of loneliness and the constant search for belonging presents itself in the form of ambiguous visuals, ominous shadows, and subtle textures. El-Tantawy’s haunting imagery confronts the viewer with their own feelings of not belonging, but also with the beauty of it.
See more work from Laura El-Tantawy here.
