50 Years of Cool

An exhibition by

The Project

GPP turned a 50-year corporate milestone into a museum-grade exhibition — about the machine that quietly rebuilt life in the Gulf.

To mark 50 years of Taqeef's partnership with O General, Gulf Photo Plus was commissioned to curate and produce an exhibition that treated air conditioning not as a product, but as a cultural force. The result, 50 Years of Cool, ran free to the public at MiZa in Abu Dhabi — four newly commissioned bodies of work, across four media, and a virtual tour that carried the show beyond the venue.

Client: Taqeef & O General
Venue: MiZa, Abu Dhabi
Dates: 1–9 March 2023
GPP's role: Curator & producer

01 / The brief

A corporate anniversary — without an advert in sight.

In 1973, O General introduced the first air-conditioning unit specified for desert conditions — built for the UAE's heat and sand. The partnership between Taqeef and O General that began that year had, by 2023, run for half a century.

Taqeef approached Gulf Photo Plus to mark the milestone. The brief was unusually open: not a campaign, not a product showcase, but a genuine cultural exhibition — one an art audience in Abu Dhabi would take seriously. The subject was the machine itself, and what five decades of it had done to the way people in the Emirates build, gather, and remember.

02 / The challenge

Make an invisible thing worth looking at.

Air conditioning is infrastructure. It is everywhere and noticed by no one — until it fails. Building an exhibition around it, in a region with a mature and demanding gallery culture, meant the cooling could not be the subject of the work. It had to become its lens.

The brief also called for ambition: four entirely new bodies of work — no archive, no stock — from four artists working in different media. Each had to be commissioned, produced, and installed at MiZa to a public deadline, with the exhibition designed as a coherent space and extended online for audiences who could not travel to Abu Dhabi.

03 / Our approach

Curate the social history, not the product.

GPP acted as both curator and producer. Rather than briefing artists to respond to a brand, we set a single question for the whole exhibition to answer: what did it mean to live in the Gulf as cooling became universal?

That question shaped the commission. Four regional artists were selected across distinct media — architectural typology, street photography, documentary portraiture, and film — each producing new work on a different dimension of how cooling reshaped the built environment, daily life, and memory across the UAE. GPP managed every artist relationship, designed the exhibition's scenography for the MiZa space, oversaw production and install, and commissioned a Matterport virtual tour so the show could be walked from anywhere.

The Commission

Four artists. Four media. One shared question.

This exhibition maps the cultural impact of air conditioning in the Emirates over the span of 50 years, inviting viewers to reflect on its transformational effects on quality of life and, beyond that, on the fabric of our urban landscape.

This evolution moves on a conversational current with the Gulf's textured migrant histories and economic development — with the rise of companies like Taqeef and Fujitsu General, which laid the groundwork for the UAE's industrialisation as we know it today.

With works in photography, moving image, and annotated portraits, 50 Years of Cool narrates a lesser-pondered perspective on the commercial advent of air conditioning through the lens of four artists based in the United Arab Emirates. Together, these works reframe cooling as a catalyst for a significant paradigm shift in the country, its people, and their daily lives.

01

Split Units · 2016–2017

Hussain AlMoosawi

Emirati · Architectural photography

Buildings as a visual language of the cooled city.

Hussain AlMoosawi is an Emirati designer, photographer, and storyteller whose work centres on documenting and interpreting the UAE's urban and architectural identity. Working at the intersection of visual research and image-making, his practice is driven by a sustained inquiry into why cities look the way they do, making him as a leading voice in the visual study of the UAE's built environment.

His years living abroad exposed him to cities with layered urban histories, enriching his sensitivity to detail and sharpening his ability to read the visual language of place. This experience continues to inform a practice that approaches the city as both subject and system, where even its smallest elements carry cultural, social, and historical meaning.

At the core of his practice is Facade to Facade, an ongoing long-term project that examines buildings across the UAE through a consistent vantage point. By isolating facades as a shared surface between the private and the public, the project constructs a growing visual archive that reflects the country's heterogeneous architectural identity. Sitting between artistic expression and architectural research, it proposes a method of seeing that is both systematic and open-ended.

Across his broader body of work, recurring typological studies from infrastructure and signage to overlooked urban details form a larger investigation into how cities communicate. In this sense, his practice operates with the rigour of a typologist and the curiosity of a visual anthropologist, observing how meaning is embedded, repeated, and transformed within the built environment.

His work extends across editorial, cultural, and research-driven contexts, contributing to a wider conversation on how the UAE is documented, understood, and represented—both locally and internationally.

AlMoosawi's series represents an important transition in his practice — from documenting temporary structures to those of more permanence. His work still revels in colour and in the informal representations of the UAE's urban identity, which take him to many industrial and urban clusters.

The series pays homage to the architectural qualities of buildings adorned with split units. A building's climate forms its exterior: central AC units are tucked on the rooftop or the ground, whereas window units protrude on the outside like boxes. Split-unit systems add a gentle geometric touch wherever they are installed, owing to their finely detailed discharge vents.

Selected work

02

A Loud Silence · 2023

Ahmed Al Kuwaiti

Bahraini, UAE-based · Street photography

The white noise of the city, held in a still frame.

Ahmed Al Kuwaiti is a UAE-based Bahraini storyteller and visual artist who looks to family for inspiration, his work rooted in celebrating what we have left behind. His primary mediums are film and photography.

Following his passion for film, art, cultures and media, Ahmed moved to the UAE in 2013 and completed a bachelor's degree in Communication and Information Studies: Digital Production and Storytelling, alongside a minor in Middle Eastern Studies, at the American University in Dubai and the Mohamed Bin Rashid School for Communication. He takes pride in his Arabic identity and in nostalgic, forgotten stories, which inspire his projects documenting everyday life — especially through street photography.

After a few months of photographing homes, old buildings and storefronts, Al Kuwaiti began to see O General everywhere across the United Arab Emirates — always omnipresent in the daily bustle of the urban places he visits.

In his photographs, window ACs seem to provide more than temperature control or a particular aesthetic quality. Their presence is so resolute that even their white noise — their low hum — can still be felt in the stillness of each image.

Selected work

03

In Quiet Glimpses · 2023

Augustine Paredes

Filipino · Documentary portraiture

The people behind fifty years of a household name.

Augustine Paredes is a multidisciplinary artist questioning what it means to desire in the light of love, loss, and longing. He also works as a commercial photographer and is represented by Dubai-based agency Seeing Things.

His fellowships and residencies include the Royal Commission of AlUla Artist Residency (2022), the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, Cohort 8 (2021), Warehouse 421 x Gulf Photo Plus (2020), and Campus Art Dubai 7.0 (2019). As an independent publisher he has authored four art books: Conversations at the end of the universe (2020), Long Night Stands With Lonely, Lonely Boys (2021), Happy To Be Here To Be Happy (2022), and The Bitter Taste of Sweetness (2023).

Paredes' portraits reflect the ripple effect of a successful business — one that unifies generations across diverse migrant backgrounds and nationalities. The people photographed range from Taqeef's most senior employees to their loyal dealers and their earliest customers.

“During these brief moments as photographer and subject, they welcomed me into their homes, offices and stores; while language put a barrier between us, our simple gestures were enough to create a sense of warmth.”

The adoption of machines in the daily lives of a growing nation can often be overlooked — and with it, the formative stories of those behind the scenes.

Selected work

O General changed the way of life in the desert. The window AC became the main topic at our gatherings at night — everyone showing off who had a better-cooled living area.

Dr Salem Mohamad Al Ameri — photographed for In Quiet Glimpses

04

Then, a different breeze blew · 2023

Fatema Al Fardan

Emirati · Film & video installation

Cooling as a mirror of a country coming into being.

Fatema Al Fardan is an artist committed to seeing the world with curiosity and care. Driven by inquiry, her practice is facilitated through research.

Al Fardan is currently a Resident Artist at the Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi (2022–23) and a Kawader Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi. She was granted the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2021–22) and was selected for the 421 x Gulf Photo Plus Artistic Development Program (2020–21). Al Fardan likes to hear stories more than she likes to tell them.

Al Fardan delivers a poetic retelling of the chronicles of a woman recalling life in the Trucial State of Dubai in the 1950s, before the establishment of the United Arab Emirates. She recounts the transition into electricity and the beginnings of modern cooling, which were widely adopted and soon became ubiquitous in most Emirati households.

These advancements seem to usher in — or, more conservatively, to mirror — a new transitionary period, just ahead of the union's historic founding.

Then, a different breeze blew

04 / Exhibition design

Designing the space the work would live in.

Curation was only half of it. GPP designed the exhibition's scenography for the MiZa venue — planning how four very different bodies of work would be sequenced, hung, and lit across a single open floor, indoors and out.

The renders below are from GPP's exhibition-design stage: the floor plan, the hang, and the approach to the space — the production drawings that became the show.

Exhibition design render — Floor plan — the hang

The Exhibition

The work, installed.

Opening Night

27 February 2023.

Before the doors opened to the public, 50 Years of Cool was unveiled to Taqeef's people, partners, and guests at MiZa — the four commissioned works lit and hung, the company's own portraits among them. The show then ran free to the public for nine days.

Virtual Tour

Walk the exhibition from anywhere.

GPP commissioned a Matterport tour alongside the physical show — full spatial access for audiences who couldn't travel to Abu Dhabi, and a permanent record of an exhibition that ran for nine days.

Outcomes

What it delivered.

A first-of-its-kind cultural exhibition for an HVAC brand — positioning O General as part of the UAE's social history, not just its product history.
Four new bodies of commissioned work across four media: architectural typology, street photography, documentary portraiture, and film.
Full curatorial direction, exhibition design, production and install delivered for the MiZa venue, to a fixed public deadline.
A Matterport virtual tour that extended the nine-day show into a permanent, globally accessible record.
Free public admission across the run — an anniversary returned to the public as a cultural event rather than a campaign.

Have a story worth exhibiting?

Gulf Photo Plus curates and produces exhibitions, commissions, and photography programmes for brands and institutions — work built to outlast a campaign. If you have a milestone, an archive, or an audience worth reaching, let's talk.

Start a conversation

Gulf Photo Plus — Consulting & Curation

A corporate anniversary — without an advert in sight.

Make an invisible thing worth looking at.

Curate the social history, not the product.

Four artists. Four media. One shared question.

Hussain AlMoosawi

Ahmed Al Kuwaiti

Augustine Paredes

Fatema Al Fardan

Designing the space the work would live in.

The work, installed.

27 February 2023.

Walk the exhibition from anywhere.

What it delivered.

In the media.

Have a story worth exhibiting?