The Third Line is pleased to present The Lost Empire, Fouad Elkoury’s third solo show in Dubai, which presents the artist’s photographic journey through abandoned soviet military bases.

In a practice spanning more than four decades, Fouad’s work has come to be associated with documentary photography through lands that have experienced strife – with the landscape and architecture pockmarked with human conflict. The current body of work explores a similar topography of war.

After having decided to document abandoned soviet military bases in 2009, Fouad visited dozens of military bases in Poland, Hungary, Estonia and East Germany between 2010 and 2011. Most were aviation fields; others served separate purposes. And despite having being told there was nothing to photograph there, Fouad found the abandoned desolation far more captivating. 

Deserted and invaded by nature, a force far more primal and stronger than weapons of war, the bases have become unserviceable areas of land. The utter silence and emptiness left Fouad the only protagonist in the plot, searching for abandoned stories, and his only ally was light, without which nothing could be seen.

Image: © Fouard Elkoury 
Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line