Xposure 2026 spotlights sluggish images and lived expertise artwork

At the guts of this anniversary version are 5 exhibitions that replicate what Xposure has come to characterize over the previous decade. A platform for photographers who return, hear, and construct belief, typically lengthy after headlines fade.

Life behind closed doorways in Afghanistan

For Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri, images started as a strategy to perceive displacement. Growing up in Tehran earlier than shifting to Toronto as an adolescent, she discovered to watch fastidiously when phrases weren’t sufficient.

That intuition formed the eight years she spent in Afghanistan. At Xposure 2026, her exhibition No Woman’s Land presents an intimate portrait of Afghan girls dwelling below Taliban rule. Today, Afghanistan stays the one nation the place women are banned from secondary training, whereas girls face sweeping restrictions on motion, work, and public life.

Hayeri’s images concentrate on what persists behind closed doorways, underground school rooms, household bonds, non-public celebrations, and moments of quiet pleasure that resist erasure. Rather than lowering girls to symbols of struggling, her work insists on complexity. Tenderness sits beside defiance. Survival is proven not as spectacle, however as every day actuality.

The Mediterranean beneath the floor

Award-winning underwater photographer Greg Lecoeur has spent years documenting the ocean he grew up beside. Raised in Nice, France, his work is formed by lengthy familiarity with the Mediterranean, a physique of water that covers lower than 1% of the world’s ocean floor but holds greater than 10% of its identified marine biodiversity.

His exhibition Mediterranean, An Ocean of Life, proven at Xposure 2026, brings viewers face-to-face with fin whales, dolphins, turtles, seagrass meadows, and coral techniques. It additionally reveals the pressures threatening this fragile ecosystem, from plastic air pollution and overfishing to ship strikes and local weather change.

Lecoeur’s method avoids alarmism. Instead, his photographs invite closeness, asking viewers to recognise the ocean as a shared inheritance, and duty because the pure consequence of consideration.

Antarctica’s silence, captured

Few locations on Earth are as visually overwhelming and emotionally restrained as Antarctica. Australian photographer Joshua Holko has spent years returning to the polar areas, working in circumstances that reward endurance over velocity.

At Xposure 2026, Antarctica:White Silence explores one of many planet’s final nice wildernesses. Towering icebergs drift by means of huge seascapes. Light shifts slowly throughout frozen horizons. At the centre of the exhibition are emperor penguins, enduring excessive chilly by means of cooperation, resilience, and intuition.

Holko’s photographs are each tribute and warning. The ice seems timeless, but it’s more and more susceptible. His images linger lengthy sufficient to remind viewers that silence, too, carries consequence.

Everyday energy, quietly seen

Saudi photographer Mohammed Muhtasib turns his lens towards the extraordinary. Based in Jeddah, his work focuses on folks, custom, and every day life throughout cultures.

At Xposure 2026, Women, Stories in Pictures presents girls not as archetypes, however as people. Farming, cooking, caring, instructing, and resting. Strength emerges by means of repetition and duty somewhat than heroism.

Muhtasib’s photographs ask viewers to decelerate and spot what is usually neglected, not as a result of it’s uncommon, however as a result of it’s fixed.

Mothers, care, and the load of techniques

London-based documentary photographer Carol Allen-Storey has spent greater than a decade working alongside households within the United Kingdom elevating kids with extreme disabilities, a lot of them single moms navigating advanced and unforgiving techniques.

Her exhibition Defying the Myth: A photographic journal of affection, resilience, and survival at Xposure 2026 paperwork lives formed by forms, exhaustion, and isolation. It additionally reveals one thing extra enduring. Love as every day labour. Care as resilience. Dignity as an ongoing combat.

Allen-Storey’s work doesn’t search sympathy. It asks for recognition, and for a reconsideration of how society defines worth, dependency, and energy.

A decade outlined by presence

Together, these exhibitions replicate the core of Xposure’s tenth version. A perception that images issues most when it’s grounded in time, belief, and lived expertise.

In Sharjah, this January, Xposure is just not providing quick photographs or straightforward narratives. It is providing one thing distinctive. Space to look longer, hear extra carefully, and perceive what stays when the noise falls away.