Warehouse421

Dubai has the largest billboards in the world. While the city has turned breaking Guinness Book world records into an artform, or at least into government policy, these billboards aren’t big for its own sake. Rather, they are big to hide large tracks of unoccupied land in the middle of the city as well as the labor toiling within.

 

In this way, billboards don’t only produce the utopic dreams of the state—billboards also obscure the blight of the present. The billboard in Dubai physically hides the negative externalities of the real estate it occupies.

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Christopher Joshua Benton and his collaborators Rakan Ghresi and Ashay Bhave use film and still imagery in the faux-advertisement to satirize the aesthetics and rhetoric of real estate marketing, using many of the same tools used to create a real one: digital renderings, stock photography, and aspirational and superlative but largely generic language.

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Local and vernacular imaginaries are mined for symbols—dhow sails, palm trees, wind towers, and desert roses are popular and well-known examples—that perform an authenticity that grounds otherwise entirely deterritorialized digital visions of luxury living. The result is an uncanny glocal image, with just enough here to appeal to those at home yet mobile and universal enough to generate interest and investment among those based elsewhere. (Text adapted from curator/writer Murtaza Vali)