Learning Abu Dhabi represents a synthesis of four years of living in and exploring the place I have come to think of as a home. It seeks to document my process of learning from the city, a process of trying to understand why things are the way they are, and how they came to be. It is an exploration into how urban spaces impart knowledge to their inhabitants, and how cities can tell us stories about the people that design and inhabit them. Abu Dhabi contains a wealth of fascinating experiments in architecture and urban planning that mirror the wills and desires of a burgeoning nation state. Through a series of photographs and essays, I hope to reveal the city as a globally unique urban environment, one that offers an insight into the many translations and interpretations of (post)modernity in the Gulf, and thus worthy of artistic and scholarly interest.

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ARTIST BIO

Finn Murray-Jones is a researcher working in the liminal spaces between art and architecture, documenting urban spaces both visually and textually. He is continually inspired by the cities he encounters around the world, and how they can function as direct representations in physical space of the people that build and live in them.