In September 2025, Charlie Koolhaas presented City Lust at Jossa by Alserkal, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, bringing together photography, sculpture, books and Foto-Couture in a major solo presentation of her work.
The exhibition marked the first time that City Lust, originally published as a book in 2020, was expanded fully into physical space. Drawing on more than two decades of photographing and writing about Dubai, Guangzhou, Lagos, London and Houston, Koolhaas transformed the gallery into an environment in which photographs moved beyond the conventional framed image and into sculptural forms, installations and clothing.
At the centre of the exhibition was Koolhaas’s continuing investigation into globalisation and the new cultures produced through migration, trade and the increasingly intense connections between cities. Rather than approaching globalisation solely through narratives of homogenisation or loss, City Lust looks at the unexpected visual languages, identities and forms of cultural hybridity that emerge when different worlds meet.
The exhibition also developed Koolhaas’s long-running experiments with the physical form of photography. Images were cut, folded and reconstructed into sculptural works, while Foto-Couture transformed photographic archives into garments, allowing images of the city to leave the gallery wall and circulate on the body.
On the final day of the exhibition, Koolhaas was joined in conversation by Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director Curatorial at Art Dubai Group, for a discussion about Koolhaas’s twenty-year engagement with Dubai, the changing nature of photography and the ways new technologies are reshaping the medium.
The exhibition received extensive coverage in Gulf Today, which described the show as a moment in which City Lust moved “off the page and into space,” bringing photography into dialogue with architecture, fashion and lived experience.
