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.

A fattened cow, with disturbingly bulging udders, from whose back protrudes an urban metropolis and around which Super Mario’s Rainbow Road twists and turns, is upon the mothership. The ‘Mothership’ is an American Apparel (or is it American Airlines?) space rocket and hovers to a pulsing and somewhat ominous soundtrack against a champagne sky.