Gulf Photo Plus

Haraka Baraka by , &
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“Haraka Baraka” (الحركة بركة) is an Arabic expression meaning “movement is a blessing” - a phrase that resonates deeply within skate culture and everyday life alike. Published by SkatePal in collaboration with Lebanese designer Samar Maakaroun, this 224-page hardcover publication offers a vibrant and thoughtful introduction to the Arabic language through the lens of skateboarding, community, and lived experience.⁠
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Bringing together expressions shouted across streets, proverbs rooted in history, and regional dialects shaped by everyday conversation, the book is built through contributions from Palestine’s skateboarding community, local shop owners, volunteers, friends, and members of the global Palestinian diaspora.⁠
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Across original photography, typographic interventions, interviews, and explorations of Arabic script and calligraphy, Haraka Baraka moves between language guide, visual archive, and cultural document. The publication reflects on movement not only as physical action, but as exchange, resilience, connection, and collective spirit.⁠

Designed by with , the book extends the organisation’s ongoing work supporting skateboarding communities across Palestine while celebrating the richness and adaptability of the Arabic language.⁠
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Hardcover | Palestine | 210 × 297 mm | 223 Pages | Published by SkatePal⁠
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Available in-store and online via the link in our bio, or visit: https://gulfphotoplus.com/products/haraka-baraka

Liminal Cosmos by artist Martin Ong Yambao () is a body of work originates from a collection of undeveloped disposable cameras found in thrift shops. These discarded objects, once memory-preservers, now become vessels of loss, absence, and fragmented remembrance. Through experimental interventions such as misregistration, blurring, and erasure, the recovered images are deliberately destabilized. This aesthetic of distortion protects identities while evoking the impermanence of memory, bringing forth ghostly fragments that explore the tension between presence and disappearance. This series is an extension of the artist’s engagement with postmemory as a method, raising questions about reinterpretation, authorship and the ethics of looking.

Dubai-based artist Martin Ong Yambao, works across moving image, painting, sculpture, and installation. His practice explores the impermanence of memory and its relationship to both personal and collective experience, often engaging with disruption, fragmentation, erasure, and presence through the use of found materials and altered imagery.

Alongside his individual practice, he is one half of memoryall (), a media art studio developing site-specific projections, installations, and performances that weave socioecological narratives into architectural and historical contexts.

Liminal Cosmos was previously presented in The Gateway Exhibition: Seeds of Memory – Migration as Ceremony, Survival, and Renewal, curated by Brook Andrew and Sa Tahanan Co. (.co), founded by and .

The work is currently part of Patterns of Uncertainty, a group exhibition by curated by and , featuring 9 UAE-based artists. On view at , until June 7.

Moza’s (.samosa) ‘Smoke Fair’ unfolds as a site-specific installation that blurs the line between entrepreneurial fantasy, documentary observation, and self-exposure. Through framed photographic prints, drawings, and the presence of sh**ha itself, the work follows a fictionalised yet familiar figure: a young man attempting to understand addiction, visibility, and market logic through the lens of contemporary hustle culture.

Borrowing the language of automated business advice, online self-help rhetoric, and startup thinking, the installation traces how ambition is shaped by algorithms, spectatorship, and detached forms of research. The protagonist moves through the World Sh**ha Convention as both observer and participant, using the camera as a shield as much as a tool.

Photography becomes a way to distance himself from vulnerability while simultaneously forcing him into moments of uncomfortable attention and intimacy.

What begins as an ironic business experiment slowly collapses into something more personal. As the figure attempts to test “minimal risk” strategies within the art world itself, the work reveals the emotional contradictions behind self-branding, collaboration, and visibility.

Smoke Fair ultimately reflects on the uneasy overlap between commerce and identity, where consumption, performance, and creative practice become difficult to separate.

‘Smoke Fair’ is part of Patterns of Uncertainty, a group exhibition by , curated by and , featuring 9 UAE based artists. On view at , until June 7.

Quick update on the lab schedule for the Eid holidays 🌙

We’ll be off from Tuesday, May 26 until Friday, May 29.

If you’d like your film developed before Eid, please drop them off by Friday, May 22.

Films dropped off on Monday, May 25 may experience slight delays.

Printing will also be on pause from the 26th and will resume June 1st.

Eid Mubarak! ✨