There are still a couple to go - notably the Third Line gallery and TheJamJar's summer shows - but by now, most of the exhibitions that will see Dubai through this summer's culture drought are open. What do they have to offer? In a word, they have photography. This is the season of the snapper, and there are few places that didn't get the memo. They all seem to have interpreted it in slightly different ways, though. Instead of tedious homogeneity, a tour of Dubai's gallery districts conveys a rich sense of the possibilities of the medium.
That Shimmering Beast is a three-artist show at the Empty Quarter gallery and its stated aim is "the capture of urban life". A better heading for the show might have been found in the title to Virgilio Ferreira's series: Uncanny Spaces. The work collected here is only occasionally connected to the notion of the city but it is uniformly sinister and otherworldly, filled with ghosts and illusions.
Ferreira, a resident of Porto in Portugal, specialises in tricky multiple exposures, hazes of light and mysterious reflections. In a city avenue the double-image of a giant gold rottweiler statue hovers among the passers-by. Elsewhere we see a lake through pine trees, except the trunks of the trees are reduced to blurs, their actual location indicated as a spread of probabilities. The sky is startling blue and then suddenly grey, and at the shoreline a woman in a bikini looks out over the water, encased in a warm halo of light.
Ferreira is making dream images, yet rather than assembling them in Photoshop he is hunting them in the wild, waiting for something unaccountable to cross his viewfinder. On some occasions this is little more than a chaotic pattern of lights but at its best, his work has an insinuating power that is difficult to ignore. Iran's Mehrdad Naraghi seems the weaker partner in this show. His House collection is a series of still-lives of domestic dust and detritus, of furniture stored under plastic sheeting and the piles of clutter that accumulate in attics.
There's something striking about the way neglect reduces everything to the same cobwebby colours. Furthermore it is strange, if not actively uncanny, that these sad corners should seem so unplaceable - the old bike, the empty Coca-Cola crate. They could be anywhere, therefore they're nowhere. Naraghi's other series, Fog and Darkness, is a collection of blurred and sepia-coloured shots of gaunt houses, narrow alleys, water-towers emerging from a dark tangle of trees. This is all a bit gothic for my taste, but the series is intriguingly mirrored in the work of Miyuki Okuyama, a Japanese photographer now living in the Netherlands.
At first glance, her pictures, some of which are gathered under the title Safe Playground, offer the same sort of thing: a water tower, a grain elevator standing out against the inky sky. A motel sign emerging from darkness situates us somewhere in Psycho country, until one looks closer and realises that all these scenes are models, created in miniature by the photographer and shot with a pinhole camera.
Stage Hypnotist picks out a dolls-house chair against the silvery blur of burlesque-show curtains. In Circus, a paper Big Top stands in the middle of a pitch-black wasteland that may only be the size of a child's sandpit. The tent is lit by floodlights, and we see the shadow of what appears to be a horse on one of its flaps. The sinister and the marvellous combine in these fascinating games of atmosphere and scale.
Over at the Portfolio Gallery, the former White House photographer Tina Hager has a documentary show titled Iraq: Transition to Peace. Her access, of course, was superb. Here's George W Bush, casual in a white T-shirt, chatting amiably to his pilots on Air Force One, literally lost in the clouds. Here's Condoleezza Rice in a jet-fighter's helmet, glowering with an approximation of grim determination.
And, of course, there are the obligatory shots of US field hospitals and house raids and blasted buildings. The series becomes compelling, however, when it starts to look at what hasn't been destroyed, or at least, not yet. We find ourselves in the neat-as-a-pin interior of a small restaurant in Karada, decorated in that universally homely style of ornamental ladles and clocks in the shape of a ship's steering wheel. It looks horribly fragile. In Erbil we see a car showroom, all gleaming surfaces and expensive toys, and a cycling club, whizzing past in Lycra and aerodynamic helmets. A young girl takes a tennis lesson. A baby is cradled over the font at an Easter church service. Are these signs of life returning to Iraq, or documents of what was placed in jeopardy?
Carbon 12's new show, Blue Skie'd and Clear, approaches photography from more of an aesthete's perspective. Maria Maeser pastes photos of the night sky on light boxes and then picks out unlikely constellations - a donkey, a large-headed child - using the kind of wobbly, pixilated line familiar from experiments with MS Paint.
Jamie Baldridge bridges the distances between Edwardian portraiture, early surrealist photography and contemporary magazine work with his mystifying scenes. In one, a girl looks to the hole in the roof through which a metal safe has fallen, crushing her pram. In another, a girl in a lacy gown sits in a chair by an open window. An arrow pierces her heart, wooden ladders are propped up around her on all sides as though she were a fortress under siege, and she gazes glumly off the edge of the picture.
There's a kind of high silliness at work here, but the most striking piece in the show is altogether cooler in temperament. Vienna Rain is a lenticular print from the Bulgarian photographer Maximilian Pramatarov. Lenticular prints are the ones that come with a finely corrugated plastic lens over them so that when you move, the image springs into motion or appears in three dimensions. In a sense, this particular one does both: it's a view of one huge mansion block taken through the high window across the street. As you walk past it the image refocuses between the drizzly view and the raindrops on the near-side window-pane, mimicking the back and forth movement of the eye and creating a sense of the intervening space that, unlike a few of the 3D movies currently making the rounds, actually feels like something - a cold, sad distance, at once impersonal and strangely comforting.
Even the XVA gallery, usually a stronghold of the hand-made artifact, has a couple of photo shows as part of its summer exhibition. The gallery decided that, as the temperature hits 50 degrees, it would be amusing to fill its walls with snowy scenes of Christmas markets and reindeer dioramas. So it proves: Nikolai Wiezorek's documentary series about German street-life at Christmas is wry and affectionate, filled with an accidental surrealism.
A lone Santa Claus stands at a bratwurst stand at dusk, staring with weary loathing at a blue bin liner. An elderly woman gazes in confusion at a display of painted baubles, each one a kitsch little world in itself. And so is Christmas, a peculiar, not altogether happy sphere which descends over the fixtures of ordinary life - pavements and office blocks and double-glazed windows - and makes them seem out of place.
It isn't camera work, but the XVA's collection of images created by the young Emirati artist Maitha bin Demithan is photography of a sort. Demithan puts children in brightly patterned traditional garments and then scans them using a flatbed scanner, piecing their bodies back together one foolscap piece at a time. It's a simple idea but the results are striking: the children appear as if in a state of suspended animation, floating in black space. Their eyes are closed, and we can see where their skin and clothes are flattened against the glass. The detail of their fabrics is picked out in better-than-photographic clarity. The way that the images are assembled from rectangular sections gives them a collage-like quality. Once again, we are confronted by the uncanny.
Of this crop of recent openings, only the Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde has left the camera entirely behind. Set Me Free From My Chains, besides being a quotation from an Umm Kalthoum song, is a show by the Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah, last seen in Dubai when she took one of the prize commissions in the first Abraaj Capital Art Prize.
The piece she created for that award was a star-studded pagoda raised over a reflective walkway, and so it is perhaps not surprising that her new show also holds a mirror up to some celestial bodies. To put the point in less leering, more theoretically reputable terms, the new work examines representations of the female body as the locus of male desire. It takes classic images of seductive Arabic womanhood and reduces them to schematic, almost calligraphic designs.
We see Samia Gamal's phantasmic dance from the 1949 film Afrit Hanem transformed into a sequence of looping designs in red lacquer. Ingres' 1814 Orientalist painting Reclining Odalisque is turned into another constellation of swirls and the image as a whole is broken into framed sections which crazy-pave their way across the wall. At the same time, Bouabdellah has created a series of calligraphic works, some in louche, blinking neon, into which all the libidinous vibrancy of her source images have been magically transferred.
Taken as a whole, one realises, the work is probing the erotics of the drawn line, not quite as it appears when liberated from the constraints of representation, but perhaps as it looks when given a longer than usual chain. The cold eye of the camera would have had no place here; it's the kind of project where you have to feel your way.
