Sharjah Art Foundation Opens UAE’s First Public Photography Gallery

New venue in Al Manakh expands the Foundation’s long-term dedication to images, heritage structure, and public entry to the humanities.

The Photography Gallery, 2025. Photo by Danko Stjepanovic

Sharjah Art Foundation inaugurated its new Photography Gallery in November 2025, marking the primary public gallery within the United Arab Emirates devoted completely to the photographic medium. The opening came about on 8 November 2025 and was attended by His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Member of the Federal Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates and Ruler of Sharjah, alongside artists, cultural practitioners, and senior officers.

Located in Al Manakh and dealing with the outstanding Kuwait Roundabout, the Photography Gallery occupies a former telecommunications constructing courting again to the late Seventies. Constructed throughout a interval of speedy enlargement following the Gulf’s oil growth, the constructing was amongst Sharjah’s earliest trendy constructions. Over a number of a long time, it underwent a sequence of alterations and partial demolitions earlier than falling into disuse within the early 2010s. Its transformation right into a public gallery is a part of Sharjah Art Foundation’s ongoing adaptive reuse technique, activating trendy and heritage buildings as areas for artwork, studying, and public engagement throughout the emirate.

The opening of the Photography Gallery marked a big enlargement of the Foundation’s dedication to images as each a creative and historic medium. The venue now hosts Vantage Point Sharjah, the Foundation’s annual images exhibition, alongside skilled workshops, movie initiatives, and large-scale exhibitions by worldwide photographers. Conceived as a year-round programme, the gallery positions images as a crucial software for analyzing social histories, visible tradition, and modern inventive observe inside the area and past.

Launched alongside the gallery’s opening, Photographic Encounters alongside the Gulf Coasts stays on view as a long-term exhibition drawn from the gathering of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi. Presented on the Photography Gallery, the exhibition brings collectively 165 images and archival paperwork courting from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The works embody glass slides depicting individuals, landscapes, and on a regular basis actions throughout the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean littorals, presenting the area as a traditionally interconnected zone formed by commerce, migration, and cultural alternate.

Rather than providing a set historic narrative, the exhibition foregrounds images itself as a medium formed by context, circulation, and interpretation. Many of the pictures lack definitive attribution, with photographers, dates, and areas remaining unsure. Titles hooked up to some works are equally ambiguous, elevating questions on authorship and the shifting meanings pictures purchase over time. By presenting the pictures as discovered artefacts, the exhibition attracts consideration to how histories are constructed, mediated, and re-read throughout generations.

The show additionally highlights early photographic applied sciences, together with glass slides and a magic lantern, situating the pictures inside broader histories of visible replica. Through this materials focus, Photographic Encounters alongside the Gulf Coasts underscores images’s position in shaping data manufacturing, colonial and postcolonial imaginaries, and modern understandings of the Gulf’s previous.

Architecturally, the Photography Gallery continues Sharjah Art Foundation’s observe of putting modern artwork in dialogue with the emirate’s constructed atmosphere. The undertaking was designed by the Sharjah Art Foundation crew, Ali Al Saqban and Nethra Ganesan, in collaboration with SpaceContinuum Design Studio, and executed by Dawson Partners. The renovation preserves the constructing’s modernist character whereas adapting it for exhibition, analysis, and public programmes.

The gallery joins a rising community of adaptive reuse initiatives developed by the Foundation, together with The Flying Saucer, Kalba Ice Factory, Old Al Dhaid Clinic, and the Arts Palace. Together, these areas type a distributed cultural infrastructure throughout Sharjah, embedding modern artwork inside the metropolis’s architectural and social material.

With the Photography Gallery now absolutely operational, Sharjah Art Foundation has strengthened its place as a regional chief within the presentation and preservation of photographic practices. By dedicating a everlasting public area to the medium, the Foundation affirms images’s capability to carry reminiscence, query historical past, and form modern cultural discourse.

For extra data, go to sharjahart.org.