Situating the city: Charlie Koolhaas views metros through prism of art in Dubai show

The curtains are just down on artist, photographer and writer Charlie Koolhaas’s solo exhibition City Lust at Jossa, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (Sept. 18 – 21). In 2020, she published City Lust with Scheidegger & Spiess; the title was borrowed from a perfume she once discovered in Gift Village, a humble corner shop in Dubai. The book was more than a collection of photographs; it was a living archive of two decades spent moving through the connective tissues of the globalised world.

London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai and Houston — five cities in which Koolhaas has lived, worked or immersed herself — became the central stage of her inquiry. Each one served as a node in the apotheosis of globalisation, and also a witness to its unravelling.

It was for the first time in Dubai that City Lust expanded off the page and into space. Charlie’s solo at Alserkal Avenue brought together her photography, sculptural experiments and couture works, transforming the gallery into a sprawling stage, where images collided with architecture, fashion, and lived experience.

City Lust was conceived as both photographic documentary and written testimony - a dialogue between words and images. With her characteristic blend of humour, intimacy and sociological observation, Koolhaas captured the rapid transformations taking place in these five cities as they become bonded by trade, migration and the rise of a shared global culture.

Charlie Koolhaas with the mike.

The book asked pressing questions: Which cultures, aesthetics, and fashions are actually truly universal, following the creation of a planetary culture accelerated by the digital age? And what happens in the liminal spaces where outliers are always present — where a Nigerian market appears in the heart of Guangzhou, or a China town is hidden within Dubai’s glittering skyline? Her photographs revealed such hybrids as portals - spaces where identity, culture, and style fused into new composites no longer belonging to one origin, but to many at once. Against the prevailing pessimism about globalisation, Koolhaas uncovered creativity, resilience, and connection — an evolving urban vernacular that thrived, despite immense economic and cultural divides.

Since 2012, Koolhaas has pursued an artistic strategy that resists the flatness of the photographic print. Rather than accepting the photograph as a two-dimensional window, she bends, folds, and reconfigures her images into sculptural forms and immersive environments. The works blur the line between documentation and recreation: more crop than image, more stage than picture. She calls these works “lo-fi hyper-realities”. Their immediacy reflects the rawness of lived experience, while their distortion highlights the instability of contemporary urban realities. In doing so, Koolhaas positions herself within a lineage of artists and photographers who refused to accept the photograph as mere surface — from the experimental photograms of László Moholy-Nagy, to the constructed environments of the avant-garde, to the spatial experiments of Thomas Demand.

But Koolhaas pushes this history into the twenty-first century, at a time when the photographic image has become infinitely replicable, compressed into digital feeds and consumed at the speed of a swipe. By folding images back into physical space, she resists disembodiment, insisting that photography remain a tactile, material encounter. Her work gestures toward a possible future for the medium: one that is not confined to the page or the screen, but that reclaims scale, tactility and performance, as manifest in its origins.

Looking at a composition.

In her hands, photographs are no longer passive reflections but active architectures — structures that echo the unstable, hybrid realities of the global cities from which they are drawn. Perhaps most strikingly, Koolhaas translates her photographs into garments. Her couture works carry the streets, surfaces and textures of global cities directly onto the body. Each piece - a mirrored high-rise from Dubai, a narrow alleyway from Guangzhou, the pulsing epicenter of a London warehouse rave - becomes an architectural skin.

The garments do not merely adorn; they transform the wearer into a living, breathing collage of the metropolis. Koolhaas elevates overlooked and marginalised spaces, reframing them as objects of power and beauty. A recycling dump in Lagos or a bucket of scorpions in a Chinese marketplace — images that might otherwise signify disposability or danger — are reimagined as fabric patterns, unsettling expectations of what fashion should be. In this way, her couture insists that fashion can disrupt the social order besides reinforcing it. This is streetwear perhaps in the literal sense of the term: fabric woven from the fabric of cities themselves. The garments extend the City Lust project, embodying the book’s exploration of globalisation, hybridity, and the aesthetics of the everyday.

It is fitting that City Lust came to life in Dubai — a city that has been central to Koolhaas’ practice for nearly two decades. Dubai appears in her work not only as a futuristic skyline or a shopping paradise, but as a city of hidden connections - a meeting point of labour, migration, desire, anxieties and ambitions. According to her, in many ways, Dubai embodies the contradictions of globalisation more acutely than any other site — “hyper-connected yet diverse, spectacular yet unfinished.” Koolhaas portrayed Dubai not as an outlier, but as a central player in the story of contemporary urban life. Charlie Koolhaas’s practice spans photography, sculpture, and fashion. Her work explores the unstable realities of globalisation, the aesthetics of urban hybridity, and the future of photography as a spatial and performative medium. She has exhibited internationally and published widely; her publication City Lust marked a major milestone in her career.