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.

Photographer Ishaq Madan’s 2021 image of Bahraini skateboarders went viral when it was picked up by New York’s MoMA. Today, his practice is more cinematic.

With his ghutra afloat, agal suspended in midair, and arms outstretched like wings, the skater in Shabab Al Mustaqbel became an overnight viral sensation when his image was shown in New York City subway stations in 2022. It was not his identity that captured people’s imagination but what he represented. In a single frame, Bahraini photographer Ishaq Madan had captured the raw and sometimes rebellious energy of youth in an often-misunderstood culture.

Although Lamya Gargash often turns her lens to forgotten spaces, vacant rooms or objects, it is the trace of human presence that she seeks to capture. In the rapidly modernising UAE, change is a subject that continually draws attention, but in Gargash’s work there is also a kind of stillness. A viewer can sense traces of the people that once inhabited the space, or the forces of nature that are taking over. It is a documentation of transition.

Monaris didn’t plan to become an artist. It wasn’t her plan to embrace the photographic medium, nor to become one of the first NFT photographers. But her pursuit was instinctive and the results testify to a labour of dedication to an innate vision; her success came as a natural and deserved progression.

Lunging, jumping, and vaulting, dance masters demonstrate capoeira, inviting onlookers in Sharjah’s Arts Square to join them. Few will have guessed that the 60-something man in loose white trousers and a light pink T-shirt, part of the crowd, was the artist Hassan Hajjaj. He organised the workshop as part of Sharjah Biennial 15 in February as a way to engage the public with his documentary Gnawa Capoeira Brothahood (2023). A deeply personal project that took two decades to come to fruition, it traces the historical similarities between Gnawa, a Moroccan performance art rooted in Sufi music, and the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira.

Fewer than a thousand people have been to the blackness of outer space. But some 20,000 were able to walk through the Xposure International Photography Festival in February, where photographs of space exploration were spotlighted in the near darkness of galleries set up as mock moonscapes—featuring boulders and suspended meteors.

Taking a look back at some highlights of last year. This is a round up of the best and most powerful images at Xpsoure photography festival in Sharjah. In dark times, photography has great power.

A travelling exhibition exploring the notion of home will travel around the Gulf and the UK as part of a new initiative by the British Council.

After spending his lifetime taking stunning wildlife photographs across Africa, Dr Harold Vanderschmidt had his first exhibition at the age of 64. He is completely self-taught and has a natural skill, stemming from his deep passion for the animals.

In the latest Art Dubai Portrait, Michael Tsegaye says: "I was painting for about two years, but my studio was very small, it was not well ventilated, somehow I do now have an allergic reaction to the paint - the photography came in and saved my artistic life..."

The Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award, in collaboration with the United Nations is showing an exhibition highlighting the plight of forced international migration over the past 70 years.

Budding photographers, apply now for Vantage Point 6 - under the theme of performance.

GPP's community exhibition Behind The Portrait, will explore portraiture taking in the environment of the subject or focusing on smaller details. The gallery is now taking submissions for entries.