Charlie Koolhaas turns Dubai into live images at legacy XVA Art Hotel
- Last updated: June 7, 2026 | 08:59
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
At XVA Art Hotel in Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood, Charlie Koolhaas, whose exhibitions are immersive landscapes you can enter and explore, presents After the Image, an installation that turns a hotel room into a working archive of Dubai’s modern architectural past (June 18 - July 16).
The exhibition, which presents a hotel room installation on Dubai’s modern architectural memory, explores accessibility and Dubai’s modern architectural heritage and unfolds across two spaces: an inhabited hotel room installation and a separate gallery presentation. Together, they bring photography, textiles, garments, sculptural objects, domestic materials and everyday things into conversation with Dubai’s changing built environment.
Developed in relation to the UAE Modern Architectural Heritage Grant, the project extends Koolhaas’ long-term research into Dubai’s architectural heritage. Many of the urban landscapes she photographed between 2005 and 2025 have been transformed, redeveloped or folded into the city’s rapid evolution.
Her archive does not simply document architecture; it records a city widely understood through its image of newness, while drawing attention to the beauty, complexity and cultural value of its modern architectural history. In After the Image, the photograph does not remain flat, framed or safely stored away. It moves into fabric, furniture, bedding, curtains, clothing and objects.
Architectural images become surfaces to touch, wear, sleep beside and live among. The hotel room becomes a new form of historical museum room: intimate, temporary, domestic, commercial and public, all at once. A central part of the installation is Koolhaas’ ongoing Foto-Couture series, in which photographs of Dubai’s architecture are translated into garments and printed textiles. These works treat clothing not as fashion in the conventional sense, but as a way of carrying urban memory on the body that wears it. Architecture is thus turned soft; the archive becomes mobile while the image itself becomes something that can fold, crease and move.
The installation also includes everyday objects drawn from Koolhaas’ research into Dubai’s material culture. They are containers of social and architectural memory, carrying traces of domestic life, trade, hospitality, labour, ambition and adaptation. In them, the stories of buildings become the story of the city itself. After the Image asks how archives can become more accessible by placing heritage inside the scale of a room, where cultural memory can be encountered through proximity, use, texture and atmosphere, rather than only through formal archives, catalogues or museum displays.
For Koolhaas, photography is not only a way of recording what has changed, but a material that can be reworked and made active again. In her hands, it can become a curtain, a dress, a bedcover, a sculptural fragment or even a room. With After the Image, she proposes the hotel room as an experimental archive - a place where photography, architecture, fashion and domestic space meet, and where Dubai’s recent architectural history is not only looked at, but lived with. “It is important to record and archive a city’s history, especially when it is constantly perceived as new,” she says.
During the vernissage on June 18, from 3pm, the artist will tour the exhibition with attendees. Artist talk will be held on June 20 at 4pm. For over twenty years, Charlie Koolhaas’ exhibitions have been places where flat images are folded into three-dimensional structures offering infinite perspectives. Charlie has authored various books that tell sociological stories by merging her images and writing into unified narratives. In 2020, she released her book City Lust, which combines writing and photography, to take the viewer on a journey through the global economy.
Her recently launched Foto-Couture, which makes her prints wearable, further frees her photographs from the boundaries of art institutions, allowing them to enter the world where their meaning continues to evolve. Charlie Koolhaas explores the possibilities of wearable photography with her Foto-Couture. By transferring the streets and surfaces of global cities onto clothes, her images leap out of the frame into daily life, where their meaning continues to evolve. A mirrored building in Dubai, for example, transforms the wearer into a living collage, inviting us to think critically about fashions relationship to the real world.
Charlie has taught media theory and photography in various academic institutions such as Eindhoven School of Design, TUDelft and the Sandberg Academy, and she has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Design, ETH Zurich and The Architectural Association London. XVA is one of the leading galleries in the Middle East that specialises in contemporary art from the Arab world and the sub-continent. Exhibitions focus on works by the region’s foremost artists as well as those emerging onto the scene. XVA Gallery exhibits both locally and internationally; collaborating with galleries and participating in international art fairs such as Art London, SH Contemporary and Art Basel Hong Kong, in order to further platform Middle Eastern contemporary art.
XVA founded and organised the Bastakiya Art Fair from 2007- 2010 as part of its commitment to raising the profile of contemporary art practice in Dubai. XVA Gallery and XVA Art Hotel are located in Dubai’s heritage district, now called Al Fahidi Neighbourhood. XVA Art Hotel is a particularly meaningful site for Koolhaas’s project. Established in 2003, XVA was the first gallery in Dubai dedicated to selling contemporary art and has played a formative role in the city’s art scene. Located inside Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood, it sits between preservation and contemporary cultural production, between the city’s older architectural fabric and the restless, experimental energy of its present.