After the Image

At XVA Art Hotel, Charlie Koolhaas presents After the Image, a project that turns one of the hotel rooms into a lived-in archive of Dubai’s architectural past.

Moving between a hotel room installation and a gallery presentation, the exhibition brings together photography, textiles, sculpture, and everyday objects drawn from Koolhaas’ long-term research into the city’s changing urban landscape.

Charlie’s photographs record Dubai’s architectural history through the details that are often passed over: facades, tiles, patterns, textures and surfaces. She then transforms these images into sculpture, clothing, furniture and objects, bringing fragments of the city’s modern heritage into the room, the hand and onto the body, giving them another life beyond the photograph.

XVA Art Hotel has its own place in this history. As one of Dubai’s early contemporary art spaces, set within the heritage architecture of Al Fahidi, it sits between preservation and experiment, between the old city and the cultural scene that grew around it.

In After the Image, the room itself becomes the archive. Rather than treating the archive as something sealed away, the project makes it porous, domestic, and alive.

This project is supported through the Modern Heritage Grant Program, an initiative by the UAE Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with Zayed University and Majra – National CSR Fund.