Kuwait is a ‘60s town-planner’s dream; looping expressways cosseting scrupulously laid out suburban blocks, as far as the eye can see. Successive city-plans have bequeathed commercial districts thronged with glinting jade towers, tidy city parks, carefully located retail zones, and neatly-planned residential neighbourhoods.
But through this ordered world snakes an internal periphery, a central edgeland where haphazard meanings emerge.
Making my way through the cityscape, I was confronted by a riot of symbols – plasterboard mansions, ladders to nowhere, empty shrouds, mirrors enough for a thousand princes.
There were moments when the city became curiously insubstantial, dissolving into its dream of itself. The nagging sense of Kuwait’s precariousness, usually suppressed, asserted itself in instances of the surreal.
I kept walking, and kept looking for the cracks in the city’s poker face.
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Keith Shuaib was born in Kuwait, and raised there and in the south-west of England. He now lives in London. He completed studies at the Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin in 2018, having taken a sideways step from his career at a film heritage institution. Shuaib’s work has been exhibited at Rotterdam Photo 2019, as part of the group show ‘Staged, Constructed, Real’ held at the Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin in 2019, and in the PYLOT Magazine Open Call exhibition in London in 2018. He has also been featured in the GUP Magazine publication Fresh Eyes, and in Paper Journal’s ‘We Love’ strand.
