Tarek Al-Ghoussein, whose work mixes landscape photography with elements of portraiture and performance, has died. Al-Ghoussein was born in Kuwait City to Palestinian exiles, and after moving with his parents to Morocco and Japan and the US, and first pursuing a career as a photojournalist, he eventually settled in the UAE to make art and teach at the New York University- Abu Dhabi.
In 2002 he began his Self-Portrait series, large format photographs capturing the artist wearing a keffiyeh and staring out to sea, or towards an aeroplane, ship, or other symbol of travel. In one work from the series, the artist is shown standing outside New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police. In a 2004 interview, Al-Ghoussein recalled how the previous year Jordanian police detained him for 22 hours during a shoot in front of the Dead Sea. The police asked ‘What was I doing, who was I, why was I wearing the Palestinian scarf, why that particular scarf – not the red scarf or the other type of black scarf? And it just made me realize how charged that scarf was. And how much, even in the Middle East, it has become almost a symbol of terrorism. I guess that just made me realize it’s not just a symbol in the West, it’s become a symbol in the Middle East as well.’
Further images concentrated on abandoned spaces, and were, the artist said, a way to talk about the history of the Middle East and questions of displacement and ownership. His most recent body of work which he had been working on since 2015 was titled Odysseus in which he aimed to document all 214 of the islands off the coast of Abu Dhabi. A part of this series was recently show at the Louvre Museum, Abu Dhabi.
In 2013 he represented Kuwait at the Venice Biennale with further solo exhibitions at The Third Line, Dubai (2021, 2017, 2014), CAP Kuwait, Kuwait (2017); Nevada Museum of Art, USA (2016); and a 2010 retrospective at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah. His work was included recently in Theatre of Operations at MoMA PS1, New York (2019–20); Negotiating The Future: 6th Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2017); The Creative Act: Performance, Process, Presence at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE (2017) and Presence: Reflections on the Middle East at the Metropolitan State University of Denver (2017).
His works are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Smithsonian, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Museum, the Royal Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, Mathaf Museum, Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, Mori Art Museum, The Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, and the New York University Abu Dhabi.
