Australian photographer Abdulla Elmaz, who lives in Dubai, did not begin 13 Cents as a therapy session. He began it angry.
The anger followed a creative rupture, a stalled period, a rebuilding. When Elmaz finally pushed through a block four years ago, the first sketches came quickly – combustible, dramatic, heightened. Cars suspended mid-air. Figures drenched in red. Mud flung across tailored jackets.
But somewhere in the middle of building those worlds, something shifted.
“It all stemmed from a lot of anger,” he says. “But that journey was like actual therapy. And that therapy turned into this vulnerability. I realised I never have to be angry to create. I just have to be vulnerable.
“It's a fine line because they are very similar emotions.”
That realisation became the spine of 13 Cents, Elmaz's debut solo exhibition at Foundry in Downtown Dubai. The show spans 24 photographs, each conceived as a single-image narrative. Together, they trace a movement – from confrontation to reckoning to acceptance.
The title is deliberately modest.
“I called it 13 Cents because it’s my two cents that nobody asked for,” says Elmaz. “And 13 has always been such a lucky number for me work-wise.”
It began as 13 sketches. It grew. It took four years and roughly Dh100,000 to produce. Elmaz assumed it would be simple. “I thought it was very easy. You just do it,” he says. “But I was naive.”
The scale of the work is difficult to ignore. Brick walls were constructed and retiled by hand after contractors walked away. Renaissance frames were sourced and altered. Security camera casings were shipped from abroad because the local versions were wrong. Resin armour had to be rebuilt after earlier attempts failed. Entire scenes were staged more than once, a year apart, to get the texture right.
When viewers see the finished images, Elmaz says, they often assume something else is responsible.
“Everyone thinks it’s all fake and AI,” he says. “They have no idea what we have to do to make this happen.”
Digital tools appear where needed – a skyline extended beyond a window, a background refined – but he is clear about the distinction.
“What goes into some of these pieces is expensive, pure manual labour,” he says. “It's costly in every sense of the word.”
That insistence on authorship is not incidental. Most of the work Elmaz has produced in Dubai has been commercial – editorials, campaigns, client-driven projects. For years, he tried to smuggle his artistic sensibilities into that space, pushing symbolism and ambiguity further than the brief or brand required.
Gradually, he realised the tension. “I stopped trying to make everyone like my art,” he says. “The clients don’t want that. They want to show their product and that’s it.”
The separation brought clarity. “Now I’m just happily a tripod,” he says. “Whatever you need, I will happily do. But when it comes to my own work, I’ll take control of it.”
The exhibition became the outlet for everything that did not fit inside a commercial frame.
“I wanted people to understand that art is not dead,” he says. “I wanted that moment where people would look at a photo and ask: 'What does it mean?' Because I never do any more.”
The early images in the exhibition carry the residue of the anger he describes. In All I See is Red, a woman painted entirely crimson stands atop a floating Volvo.
“This is like, have you ever felt so angry you want to drive off a cliff?” he says. The image stages that impulse precisely – the moment of slamming the door and deciding not to “do this again”.
In A Letter to the Industry, the camera pulls back from a mud-splattered face to reveal a car driving away. “This is the industry,” he says. “It takes, it stains, it abandons.”
His own history sits beneath that statement. Elmaz began shooting conceptually at 17. He moved to London as part of a creative duo. Five years in, the partnership ended abruptly.
“One day he woke up and said: ‘I need to be on my own.' And he left,” Elmaz recalls.
Elmaz returned to Australia, worked in retail, then relocated to Dubai in 2019. Three weeks before his first major solo shoot, he was still working in a suit shop. Each editorial project along the way became a chapter. This exhibition is the 13th.
As the work progressed, the focus shifted from professional fracture to family history.
In There’s No Place like Home, fragments of a miniature house hover around a woman’s face. “I feel like I came from a very broken home,” he says. “And I can see that I wasn’t a problem, but I was made to feel like one.”
In Hey Mum, a body lies beneath a bird’s nest suspended over a motorway – a metaphor that came to Elmaz while riding the Metro and spotting a nest built in an impossible place.
“Why didn’t you teach me a thing or two?” he says of the lyric (Buses and Trains by Australian pop duo Bachelor Girl) that inspired it. “Why didn’t you tell me about the world?”
The most personal work, Dear Nana, addresses his grandmother, who died when he was a year old. The explanation for her death shifted over the years, from cancer to a heart attack.
“My gut always said that this wasn’t true.”
The image became a way of resolving what he felt long before he understood. "I want to say to her: ‘I don’t want you to die in me.’”
Towards the end of the exhibition, the emotional hinge arrives. In Sad Day, a woman stands in shallow waters surrounded by sharks.
“I wouldn’t say this is intended to be tragic,” he says carefully. “But it’s almost like fight or not fight. Do I just let go? Or do I actually fight and try to get out of whatever I’ve overcome?”
The question sits in the frame without spectacle.
The series of works that follow move through that decision. In Heal, a hardened exterior peels away in the surf. In Serenity, the plastic chair that once defined Elmaz's early career returns as a patterned suit worn by a figure lying at rest.
“For eight years, I was using plastic chairs as my main motif,” he says. “People were like: 'That’s your thing.' I thought: 'Well, if that’s how we’re going to get known, let’s do it.'”
Instead of abandoning that identity, as he once thought he needed to do, Elmaz absorbed it.
The exhibition closes with December 2019 – friends sprawled across picnic blankets before lockdowns altered the texture of closeness.
“I wish there were a way to know you’re in the good old days before you leave them,” he says. “I wanted to end it realising where it all began.”
By the time the final image was shot, he says he barely recognised the person who started the work. “I’m very vulnerable,” he says. “Less angry.”
He repeats the line he now keeps in mind. “If I won’t stress about it in five years, why stress about it now?”
The photographs in 13 Cents are built with precision. The emotional shift behind them was slower, harder to stage.
It began in anger. It required vulnerability. And, for Elmaz, that was the real work.
Abdulla Elmaz's 13 Cents is on display at Foundry Downtown Dubai
