Dubai

The barjeel wind towers of Al Bastakiya belong to a Dubai that almost disappeared. In the 1980s, much of the district had been demolished, and plans threatened what remained. Prince Charles’s intervention in 1989 helped halt the destruction, allowing the surviving quarter to remain part of the city.

This work brings that preserved reality together with another possible future: the same buildings after demolition, broken into fragments and absorbed into darkness. The wind towers remain recognizable, but they seem to exist at the edge of disappearance, as if memory and ruin occupied the same moment.

What we see is therefore not simply the past preserved in the present. It is the point where two histories divide—the Dubai that survived and the Dubai that might have existed if Al Bastakiya had vanished.

Both possibilities remain visible at once, turning the city into a place where an unrealized future haunts its present.