'DESERT DREAM. WITHIN REACH. BUILT AROUND YOU. IT'S HAPPENING.  You have to contribute to respectful exchange, otherwise you clash, because it's our choice to come here.  We all live together, separately.  We are a culture of nomads, then and now.  A LIFE OF LUXURY AT THE VILLA.'

These are just a few of the statements that blaze across the walls of The Pavilion Downtown Dubai, taken from a diverse range of sources including Emiratis, taxi drivers, billboard advertising slogans, expats living in Dubai, and foreigners who have heard of Dubai. These snippets of interviews, along with a dazzling array of photographs of Dubai hanging in a sort of oversized book, form ‘Dubai Then’, an exhibition by Dutch artist Charlie Koolhaas.

ArtintheCity spoke to Charlie Koolhaas about the exhibition and her thoughts and Dubai’s evolving landscape.

AITC: Back in 2008 you exhibited your photography as part of the exhibition ‘Dubai Next’ in Vitra Design Museum. Your new exhibition, ‘Dubai Then’, sees a return to the subject, sort of a ‘before and after’. What is it that so fascinates you about Dubai as a place and pulls you back to the city?

Charlie Koolhaas: I started photographing Dubai In 2006 and then in 2007 I started work on the 2008 exhibition at the Vitra design museum in Germany. For ‘Dubai Next’ I always intended for my material to show the cultural aspects of the city, the racial diversity and racial tensions. I think that the role of global cities like Dubai - financial hubs that demand the collaboration between locals and a huge number of ex-pats from all around the world - is that they can demonstrate and also invent ways in which high densities of people with conflicting cultural, religious beliefs can put their differences aside in order to share space, resources and lives. Cities like Dubai prove that our individual differences are minor compared to our joint ambitions as humans and as societies.

After 2008 I continued to come back to the city regularly to visit friends, for work and also to continue to capture Dubai's evolution during an incredible moment in history. I had begun to photograph Dubai in another mode; maybe the subject became more about the finishing of a city and the atrophy - the new emptiness in a less confident Dubai, in a more uncertain world. So when it came to working on ‘Dubai Then’ I had a lot of new material, and this became the 'after' series of images that you can see in the exhibition. There are two different versions of Dubai in the ‘Dubai Then’ exhibition. Maybe the 'before' is about fullness and the 'after' is about emptiness, and Dubai is interesting because it can be both of these things concurrently because it is unfinished.

Dubai fascinates me because it tells of the speed at which cities and urban communities can be created and also how quickly a city can change dramatically. Dubai is constantly regenerating itself as spaces/ uses/ needs change and die out, but Dubai always remains filled with extremely large ambitions and I respect that ambitiousness.

On a personal level I simply really like Dubai for reasons that I can't explain because it's more about atmosphere. I like the people, the style of communication, the hot air, the weird buildings, the desert and the water. I have many friends here and I like to work here as an artist because people are interested in work about global issues; they are comfortable with thinking about global politics because people here have seen from many perspectives.

AITC: Following on from my last question, the title of the 2008 exhibition points to the future, it is full of potential. Though that title may not have been selected by you, your choice to title your new show, ‘Dubai Then’, does reference it. But this title suggests looking back and feels very nostalgic. Is this significant to how you view the changes the city has undergone in the last few years? Do you think it has passed its golden age following a fall from grace in the recession (perhaps most apparent in the effective selling of its iconic building now named the Burj Khalifa to Abu Dhabi)?

Charlie Koolhaas: Since I started photographing Dubai in 2006, I always felt like I was creating a historical record of sorts, in some way most photography does. We called the exhibition ‘Dubai Next’ because at that time Dubai was being propelled headlong into the future as a model of successful development. Everything was new and amazing. But it was only when it came to creating the exhibition for The Pavilion in Dubai in 2011 that I realised how the images of three years ago, when [taken] in the context of the present day Dubai, showed most clearly change. It was evidently a past Dubai, and I was amazed at how quickly that could happen, that a photographic record initially about the future could become about a seemingly distant past in the space of three years.

I don't think that Dubai has fallen from grace (any fall from grace is only in the mind of the people here and that's simply a matter of pride, which will pass). In my view Dubai has actually become more interesting since the recession; I see more invention, more intelligence being used which demands less money. Before everything, every idea - good or bad - was having money thrown at it, which felt disgusting and wasteful. Now people are being smarter. Some of the jokers and opportunists have left, and real stuff is happening, things like Art Dubai, which is now an incredibly successful global art platform. Art has thrived and grown here because in the abandoned urban wastelands of post-recession Dubai, places such as The Pavilion have sprung up from the ashes. Finally Dubai has something of a ghetto. It is has pain and suffering to talk about, and that is very creative for a place and for its people. It’s good for art. I think that Dubai has still got its heyday to come.

AITC: I noticed the reappearance in this exhibition of a quote from your father Rem Koolhaas from the ‘Dubai Next’ exhibition: ‘The result suggests a prototype of efficient globalised coexistence, a theatre where the world’s current connections and contradictions are played out’. This is an interesting quote and it relates back to the juxtapositions of the different sides of Dubai which are found within your photographs. I think the choice of the word coexistence is relevant, as I do feel that (sometimes strained) coexistence, rather than real interaction and integration, is often a feature of Dubai’s population. Do you see a lot of divides in Dubai’s society?

Charlie Koolhaas: I think that the divides here are a reflection of all the divisions in the world. Dubai is a microcosm. All inequalities are present here. Although there are many different people with a huge array of nationalities - predominantly they all live separately in different communities with different lifestyle that are as much a recreation of their lives back home as possible, therefore you find the Irish pubs and the Pakistani restaurants everywhere.

When we talked about this idea of 'co-existence' in ‘Dubai Next’ we were not saying that the Dubai model is the ideal form of co-existence. Rather that it is a NEW form of co-existence, an extremely practical one that is based on financial realities and the market economy, rather than the 'western' ideas of multi-culturalism. These ['western' ideas] are currently being seriously tested by questions of religious tolerance and so on as they are based on a living together with shared ideals and understanding, which is very different basis. So this new model is IMPORTANT to examine because it’s happening in other places too like in Gunaghzou, China, where traders come from all over the world and adapt the local environment to their needs.

In Dubai I think that the fact that everybody can live here in relative peace is evidence that it is possible to live together despite all these different tensions.

AITC: The context in which your photographs of Dubai were presented in 2008 differs to this exhibition in that you are now presenting to an audience who presumably live in Dubai. Whereas the works in 2008 would have perhaps played a more didactic and informative, I feel that now your photographs are inviting a more reflective reading of the city from the people who know the city and all its ‘connections and contradictions’. Is this something you would agree with? And when it comes to presenting these series about Dubai, do you have any particular intentions for the work?

Charlie Koolhaas: Yes I think that now is a time for reflection for the entire world. Therefore it’s important to look back at what just happened, because photographs pick out the details within massive social changes - it give us 'bits' that we can look at clearly. I noticed that there is a very serious and reflective mood in Dubai right now, and that is why many serious movements are happening there. The visitors at my exhibition seemed eager to talk about the changes that they had experienced, they seemed to enjoy looking at their city in a different context, to psychoanalyse it.

It has been really exciting finally showing my work in Dubai because I found that the work seemed to assert something that people living here have experienced. It also demonstrated the divisions I mentioned earlier as people could see places in my images which they had no idea existed in their city.

AITC: Your work is quite a tricky thing to define, floating between art, sociology and documentary. Not that it has to be defined as only one thing; do you see it as being part of one field more than another?

Charlie Koolhaas: I think the photography part of my work is sociology and to an extent documentary, because it attempts to show and uncover places. But I am not a documentary photographer in that I don't feel obliged to present any truth, or even to create a 'clear' picture of my subject matter. In that sense I am more of an artist. I am willing to confuse things, to play up the absurd and the surreal elements of our environment, to show that there is no 'clear' picture at all. This is in a sense a questioning of truths and in my mind that is the objective of 'art'.

But for me personally photographing is a sociology, it is a tool by which I can explore my environment. It gives me the reason to be somewhere that I should not normally be, and therefore it gives me access. I do this with interviews too, for example when I moved to Guangzhou in China, I made a magazine with interviews with traders from all over the world who were in China to import and export Chinese goods. It sounds dry but this very particular social group (that included all nationalities) was the reality behind the global market economy and their ideas about how the world worked were fascinating, scary and sometimes hilarious. I have some quotes from interviews that I have been doing over the last five years in Dubai too, and you can see some of these in ‘Dubai Then’ and in the exhibition catalogue.

In general when I work in a place I like to collect a variety of things, images, words, and media. But these images and interview are only the first step. I think my real work is in turning theses ideas and fragments into other objects - exhibitions or books or articles - that bring new and unexpected things into the environments that I have photographed. For example, for my ‘True Cities’ exhibition (Architekturforum Aedes, Berlin, 2009), I put images of Dubai next to images of Lagos and Nigeria so that a new story line of totally divergent but connected lives appeared.

I like to fully immerse my audience in my images by using three dimensional spaces, so I like to think that my photography becomes art once it is exhibited. I think that ‘art’ is the easiest label for me, because it is a highly flexible category, it can include the use of a variety of media, and people are cynical when they approach it which I think that's good.

AITC: Can you tell me a bit about how you have chosen to display the photographs? They appear as pages of an oversize book, or even like the flags which so often are used as nationalist symbols.

Charlie Koolhaas: I have always been interested in books and magazines and start every project with a book of images. I am focused on sequences. When it came to selecting the images for ‘Dubai Next’, I had taken thousands of images over a few years. I found that when selecting them I could only whittle them down to 500 minimum and I put them together in a book. When I showed this 500 page book to the curators we decided to put the whole thing up and the only way to do that was by keeping it as a book, but just increasing the scale - in the end it became a 45 meter long book.

I decided to put the images on fabric because I liked how it hung together and how the installation moves constantly. It also reminded me of the Souks in Dubai so felt appropriate. I wanted to make an installation that felt more like looking through a market than being in an exhibition. And also yes they look like flags poles too, that is the scale of them. But the installation is about multiculturalism, about a place where many nationalities live together so that symbolism is appropriate - maybe it belongs on the outside of some sort of global embassy.

AITC: Your research on Dubai has continued for some years now, and I imagine you must have a very large archive of material. With regards to selecting what to show and use in this exhibition in terms of both photography and text, how do you set about this task?

Charlie Koolhaas: It is always different of course depending on the context, museums, galleries, public spaces, books, you can do different things. The exhibitions ‘Dubai Next’ and ‘Dubai Then’ are meant for public spaces rather than commercial ones. I find that public exhibitions become less about beautiful images and more about information density. Their aim is to inspire discussion rather than the distribution of money.

What I like about photography is that it creates its own meaning and story-lines in some way, even though the photographs also have my experiences, habits and method of investigation woven into them. Inevitably I am not the author; the author is the city and the people who appear in my photographs. They are the authors of their own image and history will decide what stories are relevant or what the photographs show.

An example of this can be seen in when I was photographing the small fisherman’s village in Jumeirah in Dubai. Working there were south Asian fishermen who lived in these self-constructed huts on the beach, and amongst their possessions I saw fashion magazines. So sure enough, as soon as I put the camera on them they suddenly struck the most amazing fashion-like poses - better than any Armani model, because they knew how to work their environment. I find that people have two reactions to the camera on the street, they either want to smash it or they become street models and attempt to communicate with the their environment. It's interesting who becomes what.

That being said, selecting from a very large archive is always the most arduous job. It is always a battle between what looks best and what says the most. Do you discard the failed photographs that were the most ambitious? It poses many questions. For me it is important when I am showing images from parts of the world to which I am a foreigner that I set aside my own political influences when I evaluate them. I think that my voice comes in when it comes to creating the installation and artwork, by designing the way in which you can enter the images and the way in which the experience of the city is recreated.

AITC: Following from your last comment, you do seem to set aside any overt personal commentary in the show - it feels quite unbiased. Even in the press release, it is a mash-up of other people’s comments and observations, and advertising slogans, rather than including any statements from you. Why do you keep this distance?

Charlie Koolhaas: I like mash-ups. The story in the catalogue uses a variety of people quotes and voices to tell one conflicting story. I could not have told this story in the same way using my own words because it would seem contradictory, whereas when it's other people contradictions it makes sense because you see that a city is an amalgamation of varying perspectives.

I also don't like to put my own conclusions to my work - like a final word - simply because I don't have any [definitive] conclusions, I have no idea what the truth is. People keep asking me 'what is in store for Dubai in the future?' But I have no idea! I only have a record of now which we can all look to for clues, but the fact that I created this record doesn't give me better access to those predictions. So I don't want to put an opinion out there before I know.

Perhaps in twenty years time when I have seen everything personally then I will start including my personal opinions into my work. But for now I too am lost in a world that I don't fully understand yet. My work is the process of attempting to understand. Everyone always wants to know what you are saying, what you really mean. I think that today people are too ready to say what they think is wrong or right. I think that photographs speak for themselves; they have a dialogue with politics and history. All the conflicts and issue in the places that I photograph are there in the works without me needing to point them out - in fact it’s stronger if I don't.

It's funny because in my personal life I see things through a very moralistic lens. But it's important to not do in your work what you do in your personal life. I do make other work which is more informed by my personal experiences such as writing stories. But I separate this work from something more documentary-based like ‘Dubai Next’.

AITC: Finally, you are constantly documenting the changes and different faces of cities around the world. Do you believe it is possible for us to ever truly know a city?

Charlie Koolhaas: Cities are like people, they have characteristics, a personality. Every city has its beautiful creative euphoric side and also a dark perverted pathological side. Like with people, you can become familiar with this personality but you might never actually know them, because cities are always changing and are altered by new influences. As you go through a city you think you know, you can feel the comfort of familiarity and know more or less what's around the next corner but at any point the atmosphere can switch. You can suddenly walk into somebody else's territory and a new dark side can be revealed that can make you feel totally out of control. A city is a place where everybody is at home and everybody is a stranger. So I guess the answer is no.

Charlie Koolhaas’ exhibition ‘Dubai Then’ is on display at The Pavilion Downtown Dubai until 20 August, 2011.