With an interest in local myths and legends, urban histories, and maritime traditions, contemporary Gulf artists are turning their attention to the past. Mashael Al Saie, a Bahraini multimedia artist and photographer, uses glass and image to explore collective memory and folkloric tales around Ain Adhari, a barren freshwater spring in Bahrain. Similarly, Kuwaiti Bahraini architectural duo Mishari AlNajjar and Sara Abdulla of In Narrative conduct research, organize workshops, and lead walking tours to encourage a deeper understanding of the built environment, its history, and how it shapes lives.

In another vein, Kuwaiti researcher and documentary photographer Saad Alsharrah uses long-form photography – telling visual narratives through detailed, long-term engagement with a subject – to capture stories that connect historical narratives from Kuwait and beyond. This practice has enabled Saad to more deeply explore pearl diving as a link that conceptually binds Indian and Pacific Ocean countries, including Gulf states, Japan, and Australia. Saad’s photographic research has evolved into Speculative Horizons, a curatorial and educational project that aims to promote cross-cultural, lens-based research methods in his home country and abroad.

AGSIW spoke to Saad Alsharrah following the recent showing of his “Evasive Sanctuaries” exhibition in Kuwait’s Contemporary Art Platform to learn about the inspiration behind his creative practice, the pedagogical philosophy guiding Speculative Horizons, and the opportunities he hopes long-form photography projects can create for Kuwaiti photographers.

AGSIW: How did you become a photographer?

Saad: My career in photography was unanticipated – the genuine interest started at the inception of my doctoral studies in Australia. My research emphasized using satellite imagery to map arid vegetation in Morocco’s Meknes-Tafilalet province to support the local councils in establishing tailored desertification combating plans. I started taking photographs during the site visits in the villages south of Meknes and began to think more about photography as a storytelling medium. During these extensive visits and revisits, I fell in love with the medium and started doing a lot of street photography a few years later. However, I was also a bit lost. I wanted to build these long-form narratives and projects to tell stories, but coming back to Kuwait, that didn’t exist – it’s always the single image on a platform like Instagram or an online portfolio. I had many single images but could not conceptualize them in a project form and establish a visual narrative to convey these stories. We don’t have this emphasis on long-form projects and narratives combined with research. It’s not about taking nice photographs, putting them together, and saying, “This is what I think about this problem.” It’s rather like being a detective: exploring history and historical structures, and the science behind everything, and then using the visual medium to express your voice on that topic.

I then decided to do a master’s in photography, which really helped me with conceptualizing an idea and then using photographs and research to express a narrative through lens-based methods. I am now interested in documentary photography and storytelling in the form of an exhibition, book, or moving imagery.

AGSIW: In the earlier days of your photography practice, what were the stories that your photographs were trying to capture in the context of your research on desertification?

Saad: Doing geospatial science, you’re often sitting at a desk looking at satellite imagery at the pixel level and analyzing desert plants that are important in stabilizing the soil for the local population. So, there is a verticality to seeing the world. What was intriguing was going to the villages and meeting the local populations. These are the people being affected by phenomena like desertification, so that was a fascinating encounter on a personal level.

From my point of view, spending extended time with participants or subjects and photographing their daily lives gives you so much context and perspective – it’s a phenomenological endeavor that enriches your understanding of the social or environmental issues you are investigating and documenting. Photography, for me, is a lens for understanding the world. The satellite imagery and its scientific use helped achieve a partial solution for a larger complex problem, but these photographs provided something more for me and were a fascinating and complementary practice. Where traditionally I was just a scientist, photography helped me understand my research topic in a much deeper way.

AGSIW: How did Speculative Horizons emerge from this work?

Saad: Speculative Horizons initiative was founded with my friend and former supervisor Kristian Häggblom. After finishing my master’s, which was about the Japanese pearl diver diaspora in Australia, I got really interested in coming back to Kuwait and doing long-form and documentary projects. Our ancestors were pearl divers, so pearl diving was a conceptual link among Kuwait, Australia, and Japan. Kristian and I realized that there was not much going on with photobook publication or long-form photography projects in Kuwait compared to single-image projects. So, we thought, “Let’s initiate something in which we can link Melbourne,” where I was living at the time, “to Kuwait and bring some of those ideas over because there is a lot of potential in Kuwait.” We wanted to help create this discourse to inspire people to do long-form photography projects.

The idea was to start with a small symposium and a keynote lecture, Speculative Horizons Version 1.0, held in February 2023. It grew into a solid a collaboration and dialogue between Australia and Kuwait. The two main loose themes were “Land” and “People,” and we exhibited 16 artists – eight Kuwait based and eight Australia based – who responded to these themes. That was a novel and exciting exhibition project in Kuwait – having the artists from the two countries exhibiting together and installing the work with attention to the spatial distribution in the space to consolidate a visual dialogue. For my experience and contextually for Kuwait, it was experimental.

AGSIW: What were some of the initiatives or programs that went alongside this show?

Saad: Throughout that season, we had street photography walks and keynote lectures exploring documentary styles in the West and Japan. People were excited about the programs, movements, and dialogue they created. With the support we received from the Australian and Japanese embassies, we decided to plan for another edition in 2025 in Japan in which Kuwaiti-based artists will exhibit work alongside Japanese artists. However, we did not want to wait two years before the next edition, so we created another program in between – Speculative Horizons 1.5, or “Evasive Sanctuaries” – as a prelude to the Japan edition. For this edition, four artists exhibited Japan-related projects.

What was exciting about this show was the educational aspect. I think we have a responsibility to sustain and protect visual literacy. That’s why we really wanted to introduce this idea of narrative in visual expression. With our co-curator and photography educator, Stephanie Rose Wood, we created educational kits with interviews, sections about the artists and curation, and specialist exercises. We also organized tailored workshops on editing and sequencing narratives and visual idea generation because information on these topics isn’t available in Kuwait. When you meet younger, aspiring photographers in Kuwait with creative ideas, some guidance or support is needed to conceptualize and express them. Most of the workshops had a solid turnout. We also invited teachers and students from local high schools for tailored exhibition tours to stress the importance of visual literacy, education, and ethical implications regarding photography. We are also working on publishing an e-reader to create a sample photography curriculum for educators in Kuwait.

AGSIW: What does the name Speculative Horizons refer to?

Saad: Horizons refers to the idea of cross-cultural interaction and dialogue among Australia, Kuwait, and Japan. Speculative refers to the questioning of documentary photography in this day and age, which is constantly being challenged. What is truth? Is there truth in documentary? Speculation for us is also about giving the reader and viewer space to imagine what they see in the work. The current exhibition is called “Evasive Sanctuaries,” and it’s about these strange places that we’re not familiar with. There’s also a verticality in the images exhibited – the first story comes from space, then you descend to the ground and explore two people’s lives, and then you dive underwater – but we don’t make it very discrete in terms of expressing a narrative like a traditional documentary might. It’s very elusive, challenging the viewer to speculate about the story. This is one of the examples of speculation in the exhibition and our philosophy in general.

There is a broader movement called speculative documentary as well. It’s not very widely published, but there are a lot of documentaries moving away from the traditional form in which a journalist might collect images and claim they are the “truth” or what viewers should believe. We’re trying to introduce that concept to Kuwait – maybe we can speculate, and what each person gets out of a documentary is up to them.

AGSIW: Tell us the story behind “Kaino E” – your work in this show.

Saad: After World War II, many Japanese divers migrated to Western Australia – Broome specifically, a pearling town that has been around for 150 years. Many young Japanese came to Broome as pearl diving laborers after World War II. There was a strong migration relationship between Broome and the Wakayama region in Kansai, Japan. Many moved back to Japan, but a few stayed and were naturalized, living in Broome. With the rise of cultured pearls, that exchange has decreased. For my contribution to Speculative Horizons 1.5, I built on my master’s degree project, which was on documenting the lives and stories of four of these divers who are still alive.

There was one diver specifically with whom I developed a strong relationship, and it became more of a collaborative project and partnership and less of a documentary. I’m now making a photo book about his life and journey to reconstruct his memories using photography. Photos from that project were exhibited in the show, printed on 3.5-meter rice paper to replicate a Japanese scroll and storytelling. These alternative ways of expressing the work have been really refreshing and initiated a discourse to move away from the classical framed image exhibition, though Horizons is not the only exhibition to do this. The project is named “Kaino E,” which means “To Kaino” in Japanese – Kaino being the diver’s name. Kaino means “ocean field,” a metaphor for the sea and life in Japan in which the ocean gives abundance and destruction. The idea is also to link Kuwait with this pearl diving history, but that’s another endeavor.

AGSIW: There is a growing regional interest in initiatives connecting historical or contemporary narratives from the Gulf to East Asia. How does Speculative Horizons hope to continue bridging that gap?

Saad: The idea is to expand on Speculative Horizons 1.5 and make an open call for Kuwaiti artists to exhibit in Japan. We’ll likely use the same themes – land, people, and sea – and hope that these will inspire photographers to create long-form projects. The exhibition will take place in Atami, a seaside town near Tokyo. We hope to extend the exhibition beyond the indoor space to six or eight spaces scattered all over the city, much like Kyotographie, one of the strongest photo festivals in the world. Basically, you work with and in the urban space, whether on walls, canals, or concrete.

However, the intention is not just to showcase Kuwaiti work in Japan – that’s one element – but also to exhibit Japanese work that responds to Kuwaiti work. We’re also building on Speculative Horizons 1.5 by working with local artists in Kuwait on a series of workshops, talks, and screenings throughout 2024 in collaboration with various creative spaces in the city to continue the discourse and build a strong community to push these ideas further.