It was in 2023, at the Xposure International Photography Festival, that the seeds of collaboration were sown. Walking among the exhibitions, His Highness Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi, Deputy Ruler of Sharjah and Chairman of Sharjah Media Council, and an avid photographer himself, stopped at a striking digital installation by Dutch artist Marcel van Luit. As their conversation deepened, centred on process, craft, and the role of imagination, the idea arose to merge His Highness’s photographs with van Luit’s distinctively surreal visual language.

Sculptor, ceramicist, painter, and spiritualist, Rachid Koraïchi has had a five-decade, internationally recognised career. Algerian by birth, raised in Tunisia, and now based between Tunisia and Paris, his work has appeared in major collections and biennials around the world. Yet this season marks a significant first: a major solo exhibition at Sharjah Art Foundation.

Born in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem in 1942, Boullata went on to study fine art at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome in 1965. When war broke out at home in 1967, he was in Beirut and was not able to return to Palestine. He lived the rest of his life in exile moving from Morocco to the US – where he received an MFA from Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC in 1971, then to France and eventually to Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life. However, the city of Jerusalem was continuously alive in his heart. He once said: "I keep reminding myself that Jerusalem is not behind me, it is constantly ahead of me."