A wicker chair sits in the glow of a balcony window. In the distance are parched palm trees and a faint band of blue beyond, which, we assume, is the sea. Of all the pieces in Lamya Gargash’s Presence series, this image of a house in a state of dereliction is particularly haunting.

It’s the chair that’s most affecting. Turned slightly to the side, it is easy to imagine its final occupant taking one last look through the bay windows before standing up and walking away from the house – consigning their former home to demolition.

Gargash, a United Arab Emirates national, has made the abandoned houses of her native Dubai her own personal project. She took her camera into vacated villas, many already poised for demolition in the city’s unerring bid for renewal. She found fully furnished voids, just on the edge of extinction, that still bear the traces of life: a portrait leaning on a wall, notes on a refrigerator, washed clothes left to dry forever. The houses have clearly been left in a hurry and Gargash’s photographs capture the immediacy of their swift departure. Microwaves and sofas, plates and kitchen tables sit in forgotten rooms as if they’d just been used that morning. The images suggest that families just got up and left, and it’s this restlessness that drew Gargash to these rather sad spaces.

While I was doing this project, I went back to the old house we used to live in she says. When I got there, everything was still in the house: our living room table, our chandeliers. Like we’d never left. But now the house is completely gone, torn down, and all our stuff went with it.

Gargash talks about the constant, almost desperate search for newness amongst UAE nationals: The pace at which things are moving here makes everything look much older than it is. You walk into these abandoned houses and feel like you’re walking back in time, particularly in the context of the exterior of the city. When people talk about moving out, they’ve been in a house for ten, maybe fifteen years and suddenly it becomes a necessity to move. It’s not even renovation – just a constant desire to change.

It would be easy to explain this mass restlessness among locals as a residue of the country’s nomadic past. Gargash herself has described the phenomenon as being like a new form of sedentary nomadism. But perhaps this desperate need for newness is a way for locals to align themselves with a city in constant flux. She often refers to the exterior of Dubai: a mass of cranes, perpetual development, a roving network of roadworks, traffic cones, coming soon signs and ubiquitous foreign construction workers who mask themselves with scarves to combat the dust. This urge to renew one’s environment may be a way to temper the instability felt by locals in a city they no longer recognize. Committing to newness might offer some security in an unsettled and unceasing work in progress.