After the Image

Charlie Koolhaas has been photographing Dubai since 2005. Many of the buildings and surfaces she recorded — facades, tiles, patterns, textures, the kind of details a city passes over on its way to something newer — no longer exist. They were transformed, redeveloped, or simply erased between 2005 and 2025. After the Image is what happens to those photographs next. Koolhaas has been translating her images of Dubai's architecture into garments and textiles through her ongoing Foto-Couture series — turning buildings soft, making the archive mobile, giving urban memory something to wear. The installation at XVA unfolds across two spaces: a hotel room that becomes a lived-in archive, and a gallery presentation of photography, sculpture and everyday objects drawn from two decades of research into Dubai's material culture. The room itself is the argument: rather than sealing the archive away, the project makes it porous, domestic and alive. The location is not incidental. XVA Art Hotel sits inside the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood — one of the few places in Dubai where the buildings from another era are still standing. It has been, since 2003, a space that operates between preservation and experiment. After the Image asks what it means to remember a city that is still in the process of deciding what it wants to keep. Supported by the UAE Ministry of Culture's Modern Heritage Grant Program, in collaboration with Zayed University and Majra — National CSR Fund.