For nearly twenty years, Emirati artist Lamya Gargash has moved quietly through the world, observing its textures, listening to its subtle vibrations, and capturing the emotional residue of places most people forget to see. She has built an extraordinary global career by standing just outside the frame – behind her camera, the work and the conversation – letting her images speak for her. But now, after two decades of presence through absence, Gargash has begun a new chapter. “I’ve been doing art for 20 years now… and I thought, you know, why not celebrate myself and also get out of my comfort zone of being behind the camera.” It is a simple sentence, almost casual. But in it lives the quiet revolution of a woman deciding not only to create, but to be seen.

Emirates Woman Lamya Gargash

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Her relationship with art was never obvious. She laughs when she remembers how photography was something her family assumed belonged to her sister. “My parents always said that my sister was better at taking pictures, and I didn’t initially understand this concept of photography as art.” Growing up, she had no blueprint for an artistic life. “I believed that art was just something you could do on the weekend. That you can have an office job and that it’s something you do in your spare time.” She tried to follow that script, graphic design, advertising, anything that sounded more acceptable as a traditional career path. But each attempt to conform would somehow lead her right back to the creative world.

“Every time I tried to leave the arts or photography, I always found
that it pulled me back.”

The decisive jolt came at Central Saint Martins. She enrolled intending to pursue digital design; instead, they placed her in photography. She tried to refuse, tried to transfer, tried to persuade her instructors that she didn’t belong in that discipline. But then one professor pulled her aside and said the words that changed everything: “I think the students here have a lot to learn from you.” She was twenty-three. “These are powerful words… I was very young… so I stayed.” Acceptance, however, took longer.

“I think I was in denial. I didn’t accept it. To be able to prosper, you need to be accepting of your destiny.”

Her destiny revealed itself slowly, the way a negative emerges on contact sheets. The emotional and conceptual vocabulary she sought ended up not being found in classrooms, but rather through an exploration of her roots, and more specifically her home. During a winter break, she visited her family’s former compound in Deira, a place where her extended family once lived together. The house stood empty, but when she entered, something in her shifted. “It was like a light bulb moment. I saw things very differently, with fresh eyes.” There were drawings on the walls, traces of childhood, the lingering warmth of a place that had once held a full life. “I kept taking pictures and I just couldn’t stop.”

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That revelation became the foundation of her first book, Presence. It’s filled with images of empty spaces she photographed throughout the UAE. It’s a title that would define not only her work, but her world view. “It was talking about human presence in space and the culture of spaces.” Gargash realised she was not photographing architecture; she was photographing emotion and spaces that were slowly disappearing from her birthplace. Her photos were a medium of documentation – absence as evidence, emptiness as biography. “I want the audience to delve into the details,
to sense a presence without an actual presence,” she shares.

She wanted viewers to feel the spirit of a room, the aftertaste of memory on a windowsill, the quiet undercurrent left behind by lives no longer visible. Her commitment to film photography deepened this sensibility. At a time when the world rushed to digital speed, Gargash embraced slowness, imperfection, and grace. “For most people… everything’s so instant. But I shoot on film.” She speaks of the meditative joy of waiting, of the way the manual process lets her breathe. “I love the idea of waiting, the anticipation and the happy accidents. Sometimes the film might be blank, and I’m okay with that.” Her longtime printer in the UK has become an almost spiritual collaborator at this point, part of a ritual that keeps her anchored. “I love the manual part, being one with the space.”

Through film, she found a rhythm that calmed the storm of information that often overwhelms her. “I have major anxiety… I can’t handle too much information. So when I get overwhelmed, I retreat.” However, retreating does not mean withdrawing, it means distilling. It means listening inward. It means sketching obsessively, filling notebooks with ideas, threads of concepts waiting to reveal themselves. “Even when I’m in a meeting, I sketch to focus my energy, later, they might manifest into actual works,” she shares.

Lamya Gargash Photography

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Dress: Bouguessa

Over time, her oeuvre expanded beyond photography into installation, sculpture, and mixed media. But all of it was anchored by one question: What does it mean to inhabit a space? Not physically, but emotionally, spiritually, culturally. Her exploration of that question took her to the Venice Biennale and Sharjah Biennale, where her works explored the layered, shifting identity of the UAE and the unseen narratives of everyday life. Ultimately, it led her to the spiritual culmination of her career so far: the KUN project.

“Kun in Arabic means ‘to be,’ a command by God. It’s about surrender and humanness.” For Gargash, KUN is not a photographic series, it is a state of being. It began as sketches about fourteen years ago, but she realised at the time she didn’t have a clear creative path to give the spark of an idea. “I had a sketch made years ago, but it wasn’t the right time.” When she returned to it, she understood why it had waited. “I knew I’d gone through a lot of growth myself, so it was finally the right time.” To bring Kun to life Gargash needed a material that could move like breath, reflect like spirit, and anchor the project across spaces and continents.

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Dress: Lamya’s Own

She chose long swarths of gilded fabric. “It had that divine feel. It’s reflective, flowing, like a river of gold,” she says about her choice. She imagined it draped in Sharjah, unfurled in Abu Dhabi, flowing through London and Bath, revealing something mystical and universal about human connection. “I wanted to evoke the idea that you can have a spiritual, transient experience in any given space.” The gold fabric became a metaphor for our shared essence. “Even though we’re so different, there’s still that thread that ties us together.” For an artist who once hesitated to call herself an artist, this was a kind of homecoming. “The process of learning and connecting, that is the work,” she says with feeling. Her faith in giving space for art to come to fruition, in intuition, in divine sequencing, remains unwavering. “The importance of allowing things to come, to manifest. Timing is everything,” says Gargash.

Yet the world often asked her to explain herself before it asked her to explain her art. “In the beginning, it used to frustrate me. I felt that who I was was more interesting to people than the work.” As one of the first Emirati women showing internationally, the weight of representation sometimes overshadowed the art. “Sometimes I get questions that have nothing to do with the work,” she confirms. But she has come to understand that having a sense of connection can be necessary. “Now I’ve learned to accept it. Sometimes people need to know me to know my work.”

Emirates Woman Cover Shoot

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Coat and Trousers: Chats by C.Dam

And now, perhaps for the first time, she is allowing them to. “I didn’t grow up with a lot of confidence… I’m trying to make up for all of that.” Motherhood has played a part in this shift. “I think it’s important now because I’ve got kids… it’s good for them to see that they can be themselves.” Her growing presence in front of the camera is not vanity; it is visibility. It is an act of modelling courage authenticity, and self-possession to her four young children.

“I’ve always been very much about being my authentic self… art stems from love and passion – and staying committed.” Commitment, for Gargash, is not about output. It is about presence. It is about intention. It is about being brave enough to create in a world that doesn’t always understand the quiet artists, the gentle artists, the spiritual artists. “Art,” she confirms, “is not for the faint-hearted. It’s challenging, but the fulfillment is everything.”

Lamya Gargash Emirati

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Coat: Bouguessa; Dress: Amiraé

Now Gargash’s children will grow up seeing her take up space in the world. See her tell her story and stand inside her own narrative. It is a legacy as profound as any of her poignant exhibitions. For two decades she has invited us to see the soul of spaces. Now, finally, she is inviting us to see hers.

Talent: Lamya Gargash
Senior Editor: Jessica Michault
Photographer: Jeremy Zaessinger
Fashion Editor: Camille Macawili
Art Director: Yehia Badier
Makeup: Jean Kairouz
Hair: Loui Ferry
Videographer: Ekaterina Shirshova
Photography Assistant: Louis Pazurin
Set Design Assistant: Abdallah Adel
Location with thanks to Concrete, AlSerkal Avenue

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