MICHELE NASTASI

Michele Nastasi’s Arabian Transfer is conceived as a journey through six cities of the Arabian Peninsula. It comes after a decade of traveling and research in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait City, Manama, Riyadh, cities that despite being represented continually by the media and advertising, and despite having a foothold on tourist interest, remain essentially invisible as real urban spaces. Arabian Transfer locates the ways in which these places, acting as major hubs of global transit, embody the contemporary world’s state of transience, of people, cultures, images, capital, and goods. It is this condition of permanent “transfer”, which is exacted both on the Gulf’s many populations, and on a global scale, that produces these cities in their current form. Nastasi’s documentation of the Gulf’s systemic, rapid, and near infinite transposition draws on photographs alongside personal anecdotes and annotations, finding an aesthetic vocabulary to alleviate the ambivalence and opacity around urban migration and visibility in the Gulf, and its subsisting by-products.