Tarek al-Ghoussein is of different places and times, he is a Palestinian who was born in Kuwait, educated in the US, and works in the UAE. He is suspended in time, between an imagined homeland and a future which is constantly in the making all around him – an accelerated version of the present, ubiquitously anticipated and mimicked in architectural follies, neo-urban expansion and human domination of what is in effect a desert.

In the Self-Portrait series he has been producing over the last few years, al-Ghoussein continues to stage this tension by juxtaposing himself and those other component parts of a dislodged and only tentatively human habitat: omnipresent blue tarpaulins of UAE construction sites outline unlikely shelters, huts and sheds stand in as props for a performance of impossible dwellings, and all this with the desert as a vast and inevitably picturesque – as well as inhospitable – background.

It is difficult not to read these images as metaphorical translations of the displacement, isolation and loss of reference that affects al-Ghoussein, his artistic generation and his people (insofar as they are ever his in any meaningful way). Albeit indirectly, the works are always inevitably historically inscribed: in the post-911 xenophobia which has been thinly veiled in and cathartically enhanced by the so-called War on Terror. Al-Ghoussein encounters this resentment in the global ripples of racial profiling and paranoia-saturated media images, which he counters through the strategies of his serialized self-portraiture, and in the haunting spectre of Israel’s apartheid wall.

Displacement is a complicated identity template to inhabit, and was only ever half-heartedly represented by the figure of the nomad in 1990s art-world rhetoric. In a very specific context, al-Ghoussein’s photographic works insist on figuring other ways of inhabiting its tension visually, mentally, corporeally, and maybe biographically too. His performance of figure-ground relations describes the double bind of a place and a generation which are not one, and what appears as a formalist project, al-Ghoussein’s most recent works (D-Series, 2008), is also a complicated way of refitting himself at least into an image if not the world. In all their elegance, these works are not ironic, but if anything present a melancholy meditation on the kind of conditions thus imposed. Alienation, displacement and nomadic inhabitations only ever figure as given preconditions here against which the work is played out, rather than pointing toward a horizon of their impossible resolution.