For the outsider used to gleaming pictures of the shiny new buildings across the Emirates, Manal Bin Amro’s bleak photographs are a stark new vision that offers a wider view of what the country has to offer.
The Emirati photographer exhibited her work in a solo show at Ljubljana in Slovenia at the beginning of this month.
The two-week event was hosted at Photon Gallery in collaboration with Sturiale Contemporary Arts and was supported by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage.
It was part of a schedule of European shows featuring the finest contemporary Emirati artists being put together by the Italian firm Sturiale Contemporary Arts.
Sturiale’s initiative aims at promoting Emirati artists in Europe and introducing the Arab culture and tradition to European artists and the visiting public.
While Bin Amro choose pleasant themes and works in a spontaneous fashion that emphasises the interplay between people and the environment around them in their everyday life, the stark reality her work depicts is a consequence of an artistic technique of representation. It provides the viewer with form and figure for contemplation so he becomes part of the process that discloses the dynamics of creating visibility, of moving towards and away from the sphere of the possible, and of approaching the moment and a space in which everything is suspended.
Thus, she hopes to forge a whole new set of connections between form and content. And these connections – the result of an artist’s effort to confine images within defined spatial frames – are indicative of the intimate correlations between particular elements that Bin Amro masters in her photography.
Born in Abu Dhabi 1978, Bin Amro's passion for writing, collecting unique pictures and collage dragged her to the world of photography and graphic design.